A’s, Lawrence Butler Agree To Seven-Year Extension

10:27pm: It’s a $65.5MM guarantee, Passan notes.

10:23pm: The A’s are in agreement with outfielder Lawrence Butler on a seven-year extension, reports Jeff Passan of ESPN. The agreement includes an eighth-year club option, meaning it extends the A’s control window by three seasons. The deal is pending a physical. Butler is a CAA client.

A sixth-round pick out of high school in 2018, Butler struggled over his first couple minor league seasons. Things clicked for him in Low-A in 2021, and he continued to hit his way up the ladder. The lefty hitter reached the majors in 2023 and hit .211 over his first 42 games. While he got out to another relatively slow start last year, a monster second half hinted at his potential to slot into the middle of the A’s lineup for years to come.

Butler raked at a .300/.345/.553 clip with 13 homers and 32 extra-base hits after the All-Star Break. Among qualified hitters, he ranked 10th in wRC+ over that stretch. The nine more productive batters in the second half are all stars: Aaron Judge, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bobby Witt Jr., Yordan Alvarez, Juan Soto, Shohei Ohtani, Francisco Lindor, Jackson Merrill, and teammate Brent Rooker.

It’s impressive company, though it’s worth noting that Eugenio Suárez and Gavin Lux were among those closely behind Butler in second-half production. Three months is still a relatively small sample size. Butler went into last year’s All-Star Break as a career .205/.260/.337 hitter. He had fanned in almost 30% of his plate appearances to that point. He sliced the strikeouts to a tidy 19.8% clip in the second half last year. The whiffs began to creep back up in September, though he still managed a .280/.330/.409 in the season’s final month.

The A’s believe he’ll build off that strong finish. Butler finished the season with a .262/.317/.490 slash across 451 plate appearances. He hit 22 homers and went a perfect 18-18 on stolen base attempts. While most of his playing time came against right-handed pitching, he more than held his own in unfavorable platoon settings. Butler hit .291 with five homers in 89 plate appearances against southpaws.

Butler led off for Mark Kotsay throughout the second half. He has sufficient on-base skills to hit at the top of the lineup or the power to slot into the middle third of the lineup. He’s an effective baserunner who’ll play every day in right field. Statcast and Defensive Runs Saved each graded him as a league average defender over 955 1/3 innings last season. Butler has above-average speed and arm strength, so he probably has the tools to be an above-average corner outfield defender. He started 32 games in center field as a rookie, but he only played four MLB innings there last season. JJ Bleday will play up the middle on most days.

The A’s had Butler under club control for five seasons. He wasn’t on track to reach arbitration for another two years. There have been a few extensions for hitters in that 1-2 year service bucket in recent years. The Pirates inked third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes to an eight-year, $70MM guarantee in 2022. The Rockies signed a seven-year, $63.5MM extension with shortstop Ezequiel Tovar last spring. The Nationals hammered out an eight-year, $50MM agreement with catcher Keibert Ruiz two seasons ago.

Butler has shown a higher offensive ceiling than all those players had at the time of their deals. They’d each been top prospects and played more valuable positions, though. Tovar and Hayes were already plus defenders at their respective positions. Butler’s deal puts him alongside the Hayes and Tovar contracts. That’s a reasonable landing spot. Butler locks in a significant sum that hedges against injury or regression. The A’s buy into his breakout relatively early. If they’d waited until next offseason to pursue an extension, another strong season would probably have pushed Butler’s asking price beyond nine figures.

The A’s have signed three of the four largest contracts in franchise history over the past few months. Their three-year, $67MM free agent deal with Luis Severino stands as their biggest ever. They signed Rooker to a five-year, $60MM extension with a sixth-year club option. As shown on MLBTR’s Contract Tracker, this is the first time the A’s have extended a pre-arbitration player since their $10MM deal with Sean Doolittle in April 2014.

The spike in spending has coincided with the franchise’s three-year move to Sacramento. They’ve reportedly needed to get their competitive balance tax number to $105MM in order to avoid a grievance from the MLB Players Association regarding their use of revenue sharing funds. They’d already achieved that between deals for Severino, Rooker and reliever José Leclerc and the trade for starter Jeffrey Springs.

Butler joins Rooker as the only players under contract through at least 2028, the scheduled opening of their Las Vegas ballpark. The option extends their control window through 2032. Butler would hit free agency after his age-31 season if they exercise the option. It’s possible this is the first of a handful of spring extensions for the A’s. General manager David Forst told Evan Drellich of The Athletic last month that the team had opened extension talks with multiple players. MLBTR highlighted a few of the team’s extension candidates in a post for Front Office subscribers last week.

More to come.