Should Tigers extend All-Star outfielder?

As noted in the Tigers’ offseason outlook piece, the club has considerable payroll flexibility, even with continued uncertainty about its future broadcasting contracts. Javier Baez and Colt Keith are the only Tigers players guaranteed money beyond the 2025 season, and that duo combines for $28M in 2026 and 2027.

Tarik Skubal will continue to get expensive through his two remaining seasons of arbitration control. Still, at a projected $8M in 2025, even another big jump up to $16M in 2026 is still a discount for a superstar pitcher.  Jason Foley’s arb number will keep rising if he keeps posting saves, but Foley is only arbitration-eligible for the first time this winter.  Kerry Carpenter and Spencer Torkelson won’t hit arb-eligibility until 2026, and the likes of Parker Meadows and Reese Olson will still be in their pre-arb years.

In short, Detroit should have plenty of payroll space to seek out some star talent this winter as the team looks to build on its surprise run to the ALDS.  Beyond external additions, the Tigers may also look to lock up some of its young cornerstones, such as All-Star outfielder Riley Greene.

Selected fifth overall in the 2019 draft, Greene has long been viewed as a key piece of Detroit’s rebuilding efforts.  He was a consensus top-six prospect in all of baseball heading into the 2022 season when Greene made his major league debut and hit .253/.321/.362 in his first 418 plate appearances in the Show.  The development continued with 11 homers and a .288/.349/.447 slash line in 416 PA in 2023, though some notable injuries limited Greene’s playing time.  He suffered a stress reaction in his left fibula that cost him over a month of action, and he didn’t play after September 1 due to a right elbow problem that eventually required Tommy John surgery.

2024 wasn’t an entirely healthy season either for Greene, as he missed just shy of four weeks due to a hamstring strain.  However, he still achieved his best season, hitting .262/.348/.479 with 25 home runs over 584 PA, translating into a 135 wRC+.  Most importantly, Greene’s return from the injured list on August 18 helped the Tigers spark their legendary late-season surge.  Detroit went 31-13 over its last 44 games, going from also-rans to a wild card berth in weeks.

Greene’s production after his IL stint (.786 OPS) wasn’t as strong as his .842 OPS pre-injury, and he hit only .231/.355/.269 over 31 PA in the postseason.  Still, Greene’s importance to Detroit’s lineup can’t be overstated, as he was easily the Tigers’ most consistent overall hitter.  Keith and Meadows didn’t start to contribute much at the plate until later in the season. Carpenter was limited by both injuries (about 2.5 months missed due to a lumbar spine stress fracture) and a lack of production against left-handed pitching.

Beyond the bottom-line numbers, Greene made some big gains on the advanced-metric front.  He went from 30 barrels and an 11.3% barrel rate in 2023 to 48 barrels and a 13.4% barrel rate this season, putting him in the 87th and 90th percentile of all hitters in each respective category.  Greene’s walk rate made a seismic leap to 11%, far beyond his 8.4BB% in 2023, slightly below the league average.  While Greene still strikes out a lot, he at least did a better job of laying off pitches outside the zone, with an impressive 23.1% chase rate.  Greene’s .329 BABIP indicated that he still received a good deal of batted-ball luck, but that number was well beneath the .369 BABIP he posted in 2022-23.

Defensively, Greene’s struggles in center field and Meadows’ excellent glovework up the middle necessitated a position change near the end of Greene’s 2023 campaign.  Greene was installed as the everyday left fielder this season and became a big defensive asset, with +14 Defensive Runs Saved, +4 Outs Above Average, and a +11.7 UZR/150 over 700 2/3 innings in left.  Between Meadows’ presence and top prospect Max Clark, also viewed as a center field-capable outfielder, it looks like Greene will stay in left field for the foreseeable future, which isn’t an issue since his bat plays at the position.  Comerica Park’s spacious outfield demands more from Tigers outfielders regardless of position, so Greene’s ability to deliver plus glovework in left field is no small feat.

There’s a lot to like about Greene’s early-career results; he only just turned 24 years old in late September. Barring a very low Super Two cutoff point, Greene won’t be eligible for arbitration until the 2025-26 offseason, and thus, he’ll remain an immense bargain on a pre-arb minimal salary next season.

With four full years of team control over Greene, the Tigers might not feel too much pressure to work out an extension. Greene’s injury history might stand out to the team as a red flag between the hamstring and tibia problems, the TJ surgery, and the broken foot Greene suffered in spring training 2022. That said, those injuries might also lower Greene’s price point to some limited extent, and the outfielder could be more open to locking in some guaranteed money if he has any lingering concerns about his durability.

A pretty wide variance exists amidst the recent extensions signed by players within two and three years of MLB service time, with the highest end of those extensions represented by the mega-deals signed by Bobby Witt Jr. and Fernando Tatis Jr.  Greene’s representatives at Apex Baseball certainly might argue that their client is closer to those two in terms of meriting face-of-the-franchise types of salaries, but some pretty key differences exist.  Tatis was 22 at the time of his extension, while Witt (a little over three months older than Greene) plays the more premium shortstop position.

Greene is currently slated to hit free agency entering his age-28 season, right amid his prime years, and is on pace to land a huge contract if he keeps up his current form. A big extension lasting a decade or more would appeal to him. Conversely, an extension that covers only Detroit’s four remaining years of control might also be of interest — Greene could pick up a guaranteed payday that doesn’t change his free-agent timeline.  The Tigers would get some cost certainty through Greene’s arbitration years. Still, such a “bridge contract” scenario might be seen as a placeholder for the team since the Tigers would want at least a couple of free agent years covered if they’re making such a longer-term commitment.

Yordan Alvarez’s six-year, $115M extension with the Astros probably represents the floor of what Greene figures to land in an extension.  Alvarez signed that deal just a few weeks shy of his 25th birthday and with three-plus seasons of hitting at a level above even what Greene delivered in 2024.  Alvarez also had injury concerns (he missed almost all of the 2020 season due to surgeries on both knees) of a more significant nature than Greene, and Alvarez was already viewed at the time as more of a DH than a left fielder.  Greene’s much higher defensive ceiling offsets Alvarez’s better hitting, and it should be noted that the length of Alvarez’s contract hit the unofficial six-year limit that Astros owner Jim Crane is known to enforce on his organization’s contracts.

The Tigers have no known limit on contracts, so a Greene extension could certainly (and likely would) exceed six years.  It’s still something of a mystery as to how president of baseball operations Scott Harris or owner Chris Ilitch would approach such a longer-term deal, as Greene’s extension would represent a new frontier for the organization as it comes out of its rebuild. Keith’s six-year, $28.6425M deal from last January is the only extension signed in Harris’ two years as Detroit’s PBO, and that contract is wholly different from Greene’s situation since Keith had yet to make his major league debut.

That being said, extending a player before his debut is an aggressive move in its own right, which could hint that Harris will be proactive in trying to retain players he views as central to the Tigers’ long-term plans.  Skubal’s two years of control makes him a more immediate concern than Greene, yet since Scott Boras represents Skubal, the Tigers might view Greene as the likelier of the two young stars to be open to a multi-year pact.

As noted earlier, an extension doesn’t need to happen soon.  Waiting at least another season might help both parties anyway since another big season only raises Greene’s price tag. Still, by the same logic, it would make the Tigers a little more comfortable about splurging on a decade-long extension worth well north of $200M.  With a pretty clean set of financial books right now, the Tigers might feel the time is right to officially confirm Greene as a pivotal figure in this new era of Detroit baseball.