The Red Sox announced that they have signed prospect Kristian Campbell to an eight-year contract extension which runs from 2025 to 2032 with club options for 2033 and 2034. It is reportedly a $60MM guarantee which breaks down as follows: Campbell gets a $2MM signing bonus and a $1MM salary this year. He will then make $2MM, $3MM, $4MM, $6MM, $9MM, $13MM and $16MM in the next seven seasons. The first club option is valued at $19MM and has a $4MM buyout, then the second option is worth $21MM. There are also escalators based on awards voting and All-Star selections. The Sox are buying out two of Campbell’s free agent seasons with the options allowing them to extend their window by two more years after that.
Campbell’s stock has been shooting up for quite a while now. The Sox selected him with the 132nd overall pick in 2023, giving him a signing bonus of just under $500K. He played 22 minor league games just after that signing with a strong .309/.440/.471 line.
His success continued in his first full season. Last year, he vaulted from Single-A to Double-A and Triple-A, hitting a combined .330/.439/.558. That production led to a wRC+ of 180. He drew walks in 14.3% of his plate appearances while only striking out 19.9% of the time. He also stole 24 bases while lining up defensively at second base, third base, shortstop and in the outfield.
That huge season shot him up prospect lists heading into 2025. Each of Baseball America, MLB Pipeline, FanGraphs and Keith Law of The Athletic had Campbell among the top ten prospects in the entire league this winter.
That also got Campbell in line to make the majors this year, with second base eventually emerging as the best path. The outfield is already fairly crowded, with Jarren Duran, Ceddanne Rafaela and Wilyer Abreu in there now. Roman Anthony will join that group at some point soon. Then there’s Masataka Yoshida, who largely slotted in as the designated hitter last year. But with the Sox going with Alex Bregman at third and Rafael Devers as the DH, there’s no room for Yoshida in there. Bregman could perhaps opt-out after this year but the Sox could have Marcelo Mayer take over that spot, since Trevor Story has shortstop spoken for.
There are lots of moving pieces but Campbell nonetheless got the second base job to start the year. He actually had a fairly tepid spring showing but the club showed faith in him and he has hit .375/.500/.688 in his first five big league contests.
Though he has made his major league debut, this is effectively comparable to pre-debut extensions. As shown in MLBTR’s Contract Tracker, the benchmark for a guy with no service time is Jackson Chourio’s eight-year, $82MM extension from just over a year ago. That topped the previous record, which was $50MM for Luis Robert Jr., a deal that’s a few years in the past. Campbell got past Robert but didn’t quite get to Chourio’s level but that’s fairly understandable. Campbell is turning 23 in June while Chourio was just about to turn 20 years old in March of last year, with that difference giving Chourio some extra earning power.
It’s perhaps not an accident that the club waited until after Opening Day to get this deal done. It was reported last March that players who sign pre-debut extensions, like Chourio, aren’t eligible for the prospect promotion incentive. To discourage service time manipulation, the current collective bargaining agreement put measures in place to encourage teams to carry top prospects on Opening Day rosters. One of those measures is that top prospects who are called up early enough to earn a full service year can earn their clubs an extra draft pick via awards voting.
Campbell came into this year as a consensus top prospect and cracked the Opening Day roster. That means he can earn the Sox an extra pick by winning Rookie of the Year or finishing top three in MVP voting during his pre-arb years. That would have come off the table if this contract were signed prior to the start of the season but is still in play for Boston now that they’ve waited a few days into the campaign.
For Campbell, it’s easy to see why he preferred to lock up this kind of money earlier in his career. As mentioned, he wasn’t a huge name going into the draft. While some players can earn multiple millions on their signing bonuses, Campbell was limited to under $500K. Even though he cracked this year’s Opening Day roster, he wasn’t going to qualify for arbitration until after 2027. This deal allows him to put some life-changing money in the bank ahead of schedule.
Even the top prospects will sometimes struggle in the big leagues and Campbell was a sort of surprise surger last year. If he hits any speed bumps in the coming years, he is financially secure. He is potentially limited himself in the future, though. If the two options are picked up, he won’t hit free agency until he’s going into his age-33 season.
For the Sox, they clearly believe the future is bright and have gained some cost certainty and control over essentially Campbell’s entire prime. Should he continue to thrive on the field in the coming years, he’ll be a relative bargain. Even when he’s making eight-figure salaries in the later years of the deal, that’s still well below what top players get on the open market.
It’s the second significant extension they’ve given out in recent days. They inked left-hander Garrett Crochet to a $170MM deal earlier this week. That was a different animal as Crochet is far closer to free agency and more established as a big leaguer.
Another key difference between the two is that Crochet’s deal doesn’t start until 2026 and therefore doesn’t impact Boston’s competitive balance tax number here in 2025, but the Campbell deal does. RosterResource calculates the club’s CBT number at $249MM, beyond the $241MM base threshold. Back in February, president Sam Kennedy said the club was already over the line and planned to stay there.
Christopher Smith of MassLive first relayed the $60MM guarantee. Julian McWilliams of CBS Sports first reported the option values. Alex Speier of The Boston Globe, reported the full annual breakdown and escalators.
Photos courtesy of Kevin Jairaj and Nathan Ray Seebeck, Imagn Images
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