Red Sox discussing extension with promising RHP

The Red Sox and right-hander Brayan Bello are actively engaged in contract discussions, Bello himself tells Chris Cotillo of MassLive.com. While the 24-year-old righty didn’t put a specific timetable on when an agreement might come together, he suggested it’s possible that a deal could come together this spring.

Bello has long been viewed as a potential core piece for the Sox. Prior to making his big-league debut in 2022, he was widely regarded as one of the Sox’s five-to-10 best prospects. He posted strong numbers in the upper minors and drew praise from scouts for both a plus change-up and potentially plus heater, leading to projections as a future mid-rotation arm if all went according to plan.

Through the first season-plus of his career, Bello has pitched 214 1/3 innings of 4.37 ERA ball. His 20 percent strikeout rate is below the league average, but his 7.7 percent walk rate is better than average and his 56.1 percent ground-ball rate is among the best in the game for starting pitchers. That grounder rate and his command have led fielding-independent metrics to be a bit more bullish on the righty than his earned run average (4.11 FIP, 4.14 SIERA).

Bello’s four-seamer and more heavily used sinker have both been hit hard by MLB opponents, but that highly touted change-up has indeed stood out as a clear plus pitch for him; opponents have batted just .186 and slugged only .256 off the pitch in his career thus far. That’s been his only pitch with consistently strong results to date, but Bello sits 95.2 mph on his sinker and 95.7 mph on his four-seamer, so the velocity is certainly there for him to find success with his primary offerings. His 11 percent swinging-strike rate and 32.1 percent opponents’ chase rate are both right in line with the league-average marks, so there’s room for his strikeout rate to creep up a bit even in the absence of significant gains with his fastballs.

To this point in his career, Bello has amassed 1.082 years of major league service time. That puts him on track to be eligible for arbitration in the 2025-26 offseason and keeps him under Red Sox control through at least the 2028 season. Contract extensions for starting pitchers in this service bracket have been surprisingly rare in recent years, as shown in MLBTR’s Contract Tracker. For a whole decade, Madison Bumgarner’s five-year, $35M extension with the Giants back in April of 2012 stood as the record for this service class.

Braves righty Spencer Strider utterly shattered that precedent when he put pen to paper on a six-year, $75M extension after just having surpassed one year of service (1.003). That extension came on the heels of an overpowering rookie season in which Strider finished second (to his own teammate, Michael Harris II) in National League Rookie of the Year voting. He’d logged 131 2/3 innings with a 2.67 ERA while fanning a borderline comical 38.3 percent of his opponents.

Bello’s performance to date doesn’t measure up to that dominance from Strider, and he’d likely fall well shy of that highwater mark on an extension of his own. Cincinnati right-hander Hunter Greene’s even more recent six-year, $53M extension could be viewed as a more salient comp for Bello’s camp, though it’s not perfectly analogous in its own right. Greene’s rookie showing in 2022 featured 125 2/3 innings of 4.44 ERA ball, and when he signed his contract in April of 2023, he carried a career 4.42 ERA in 148 2/3 frames. His path to those results was quite different — overpowering triple-digit fastball, plus strikeout rate, average command and a pronounced fly-ball profile — but they roughly align with Bello’s run-prevention numbers. Greene, however, is generally regarded as having a higher ceiling.

Both Strider and Greene signed six-year deals with a club option for a seventh season. A six-year deal would carry Bello through the 2029 season, and a seventh-year club option would give the Sox control over Bello’s 2030 campaign. If the two sides were to deviate from that structure, age could be a factor; Greene’s deal began in his age-23 campaign and Strider’s in his age-24 season. The 2024 campaign will be Bello’s age-25 season. A six-year deal and club option would keep him under club control through his age-31 year and position him to become a free agent entering his age-32 season.

If Bello wants a faster path to free agency (e.g. five years and an option), that’d be understandable but would also surely mean taking a guarantee shy of Greene’s $53M. Even on a six-year deal, he’d likely fall a bit shy of that mark. When comparing him to Greene, it also bears mentioning that Greene had a larger safety net as a former No. 2 overall pick who’d received a $7.25M bonus in the draft. Bello signed as a teenager out of the Dominican Republic for a $28K bonus and doesn’t have that type of financial security already established.

Whatever shape talks take, the mere fact that Boston is actively engaged in contract talks with a core young player represents a change of pace. The team waited until Rafael Devers was a year from free agency before shelling out a massive 10-year, $313.5M extension (on top of his existing $17.5M salary for his final arb year). Extensions for Xander Bogaerts (six years, $120M) and Chris Sale (five years, $145M) both similarly came when they were established stars with more than five years of MLB service. Again looking to our Contract Tracker, the only other pre-arb extension the Sox have given out in the past decade was Garrett Whitlock’s four-year, $18.75M deal. Prior to that, you’d have to go way back to Clay Buchholz in 2011 to find an extension for a player who’d yet to reach arbitration.

Red Sox CEO Sam Kennedy spoke earlier in camp about a need to begin exploring this type of contract earlier in his players’ careers (link via MassLive’s Sean McAdam). “Starting earlier, is probably a lesson,” Kennedy said just a few days ago. “We’ve not had a ton of success in extending our own guys. We have in the past and it’s been a great recipe for success. But I think starting those conversations earlier is a great idea.”