Bobby Witt Jr. earned the bag.
The Kansas City Royals announced Monday that they signed Bobby Witt Jr. to the largest contract in franchise history.
According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the deal has a value of $288.8 million over 11 seasons. A shortstop with immense power and electrifying speed on the basepaths, Witt is one of the best young players in MLB, and the contract keeps him with the Royals through his prime on a lucrative, yet team friendly deal. The contract also arrives in the nick of time, a year before Witt would have become arbitration-eligible after the 2024 campaign.
Witt, 23, is entering his third year in the majors. In 158 games last year, he slashed .276/.319/.495 with 30 home runs, 96 RBI and 49 stolen bases. His 11 triples paced the American League. After struggling to find his footing on defense as a rookie, Witt was much improved on that aspect of his game in his second MLB season. He also cut down his strikeout rate considerably from among the league’s worst (21.4%) as a rookie to 17.4% in 2023, placing him in MLB’s 79th percentile. Overall, he produced 4.4 WAR in 2023.
Embed from Getty ImagesPer Passan, the contract includes opt-out chances for Witt in years seven through 10. The Royals have a club option that they could exercise after the 11th season to extend the contract by three years and $89 million. That would bring the total value of the deal to $377.8 million over 14 years, which would be his age 37 season.
The Royals selected Witt out of high school with the No. 2 pick in the 2019 draft. After three years of climbing the ladder in the minor leagues, which included Minor League Player of the Year honors in 2021, Witt joined the Royals full-time in 2022. He saw 20 long balls leave the park, stole 30 bases as a rookie and finished fourth in AL Rookie of the Year voting. He followed that up with a 2023 campaign that earned a seventh-place finish in MVP voting.
For the Royals, the contract signals an investment in winning on the heels of a 56-106 campaign and while Jackson County voters face a difficult decision on whether to raise the sales tax to help fund a new downtown stadium.
Negotiations have been going on between the Royals and Bobby Witt Sr., who serves as his son’s agent with Octagon, for months. Witt’s guarantee of $288 million is the second largest for a pre-arbitration player behind the San Diego Padres Fernando Tatis Jr.’s 14-year, $340 million contract and exceeds Tatis’ deal, which was previously regarded as in its own class, in annual value by around $2 million.
Witt Sr., played 16 MLB seasons as a pitcher and won a World Series with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001.
A number of organization’s internal projection systems regard Witt as one of the 10 best players in baseball and see MVP-caliber seasons in his future. During his first season, Witt showed that the game was not too big for him and displayed flashes of brilliance, and when fans stumped to ensure he would remain with the Royals, he said that he did not want to look too far into the future, but that “I want to be here for a long time.”
