Ranking MLB's Worst Contracts Heading Into 2024 Season
While we wait on the likes of Cody Bellinger, Matt Chapman, Jordan Montgomery and Blake Snell to sign nine-figure contracts, which Major League Baseball player contracts are looking the worst in advance of the 2024 campaign?
Ranking is based on a 60/40 split of how painful the contract figures to be in 2024 (the 60 percent) and how painful it might be in the long run (40 percent).
For instance, heading into the 2027 campaign, Manny Machado will be three months away from his 35th birthday and owed $280 million over the next seven years. That contract could get all sorts of ugly a few years from now.
But in 2024? The Padres only owe him $13 million, which is a preposterous bargain for a six-time All-Star and four-time top-five MVP vote-getter.
Machado's contract was certainly considered for this list, but it ultimately was not deemed one of the nine worst contracts in advance of the 2024 season.
At the other end of the 'somewhat bad contract' spectrum is Max Scherzer, who is owed $43.33 million this season—Texas paying $22.5 million; New York retaining $20.83 million—and is going to miss the first half of the year following back surgery. However, it's the final year of his contract, and at least he'll theoretically be healthy for the postseason. Thus, it's not one of the worst contracts.
Contracts are ranked in ascending order of brutality.
'Honorable' Mentions
1 of 10
Robbie Ray, San Francisco Giants: $24 million salary in 2024; 2 years, $50 million after 2024, but with a player option after this season
Seattle took on the not-great contracts of Mitch Haniger and Anthony DeSclafani to send this more painful one to San Francisco. It looked like a solid deal when Ray was fresh off winning the 2021 AL Cy Young, but he was just OK in 2022, lasted 3.1 innings in 2023 and will miss a good chunk of 2024 while recovering from Tommy John surgery.
Andrew Benintendi, Chicago White Sox: $16.5 million salary in 2024; 3 years, $47.5 million after 2024
The good news for Chicago is that Benintendi's contract is less than $20 million per year and less than $75 million total still owed. That keeps it out of our top nine. But the bad news for Chicago is that Benintendi had one of the worst seasons of his career in 2023 in what was the cheapest ($11 million) of the five years. This one already hurts, and it's going to get worse.
Trevor Story, Boston Red Sox: $22.5 million salary in 2024; 3 years, $72.5 million after 2024
Story can opt out after 2025 with Boston able to keep him around by agreeing to add on another $25 million season in 2028. Although, with the way he has performed through the first two years of this $140 million contract, there's probably no need to worry about any of that. Story hit just .203 this past season, missing the first four months following offseason elbow surgery. Maybe he'll bounce back after a few more months of rehabilitation, though.
9. Carlos Correa, Minnesota Twins
2 of 10
2024 Salary: $36 million
Contract for 2025 and Beyond: 4 years, $128 million (plus possible vesting options for 2029-32)
2023 Stats: .230/.312/.399, 18 HR, 65 RBI
Was 2023 just a down year for Carlos Correa, starting a bit cold in April before spending most of the season trying to play through the pain of plantar fasciitis?
Or was it the beginning of the injury history-fueled decline both the Giants and the Mets were afraid was inevitable when they rescinded their gigantic contract offers last winter?
If it's the latter, hoo boy. This contract might need to be No. 1 on the list if that's the case. Because if Correa doesn't remotely deliver on an average salary of $32.8 million for the next half-decade, small-market Minnesota is going to be in a world of hurt.
Even if it's the former, though, he needs to bounce all the way back to the MVP candidate he was in 2021 for this deal to feel worthwhile for the Twins.
Correa's impressive showing in the postseason—after getting two weeks off at the end of the year for rest and rehabilitation—did inspire hope he might get there. But $36 million is a lot of coin, and he will be the highest-paid shortstop in 2024, fresh off a dud of a year.
It's not quite a terrible contract yet, but 2024 will determine whether we view the next four (or more) years of Correa's time in Minnesota as advantageous or atrocious for the Twins.
8. Mike Trout, Los Angeles Angels
3 of 10
2024 Salary: $35.45 million
Contract for 2025 and Beyond: 6 years, $212.7 million
2023 Stats: .263/.367/.490, 18 HR, 44 RBI
The Contract: $35.45 million in 2024, $35.45 million in 2025, $35.45 million in 2026, $35.45 million in 2027, $35.45 million in 2028, $35.45 million in 2029, $35.45 million in 2030
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the questionable contract.
Mike Trout is still an annual All-Star, and not just because he's a household name picked on ballots around the world regardless of his performance in that season. Since the start of 2021, he has triple-slashed .283/.382/.579, averaging 45 home runs and 97 RBI on a 162-game basis.
He has also missed more games (249) than played (237) during that time, and he was diagnosed with a rare back condition in 2022 that had people speculating the superstar's career might be over.
Trout did return a month after that diagnosis and went on an absolute tear over his final 40 games with 16 home runs. However, Trout was nowhere near his usual self this past season, posting his worst marks in batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage since his 40-game pre-AL ROY audition in 2011.
Granted, those worst-for-Trout marks (.263/.367/.490) were still solid, identical to what Triston Casas gave the Red Sox in 2023. And he was heating up in a big way in the weeks before suffering the hand fracture that cost him the second half of the season.
But it has been so long since we've seen anything close to a full season from Trout that the seven years and $248.15 million left on his contract are at least on the verge of getting problematic.
It's only because teammate Anthony Rendon's contract has been so far worse and because Shohei Ohtani was so entertaining in recent years with the Angels that we've yet to really reckon with whether this has become a bad contract. But Trout should get at least one more year before we even begin to consider mentioning his 12-year deal in the same breath with Giancarlo Stanton's 13-year contract.
7. Jacob deGrom, Texas Rangers
4 of 10
2024 Salary: $40 million
Contract for 2025 and Beyond: 3 years, $115 million (plus a $20 million club option for 2028)
2023 Stats: 30.1 IP, 2.67 ERA, 0.76 WHIP, 13.4 K/9
When healthy, Jacob deGrom has been a Hall of Fame-caliber pitcher.
He'll turn 36 before the next time he throws a pitch in the majors and has only made 215 starts thus far in his career, so he maybe won't have the counting stats to actually earn a plaque in Cooperstown one day. But the career ERA of 2.53, WHIP of 0.99 and K/BB ratio of 5.4 are downright absurd.
You can at least understand why the Rangers were willing to pay him $185 million last winter—even though the combination of age and injury history probably made your jaw hit the floor when those contract terms first broke.
A forearm injury prematurely ended deGrom's 2021 campaign before the All-Star break. The following year, a shoulder injury kept him from making his season debut until the day of the trade deadline, going nearly 13 months between starts.
Yes, he was unbelievably dominant in the first half of 2021, even getting a few Cy Young votes for his 1.08 ERA in 92 innings pitched.
And, yes, for the most part, he was stellar over the final two months of 2022.
However, there were enough red flags that it sadly wasn't surprising when "deGrom" and "Tommy John" started appearing in sentences together this past spring.
deGrom made just six starts with the Rangers before undergoing the operation for the second time in his career. He will most likely miss at least half of 2024, and who knows what sort of luck he'll have in the health department over the final three-plus years of this deal. Only a handful of guys have been able to come back and pitch at a high level after two TJs.
6. Carlos Rodón, New York Yankees
5 of 10
2024 Salary: $27 million
Contract for 2025 and Beyond: 4 years, $108 million
2023 Stats: 64.1 IP, 6.85 ERA, 1.45 WHIP, 9.0 K/9
Would the real Carlos Rodón please stand up?
(And try to not get injured in the process?)
For the two years directly before signing his mega contract, Rodón was exquisite. He missed a few weeks and had other starts drastically spaced out in 2021, yet was the third-most valuable pitcher in the majors from 2021-22, per FanGraphs.
For the two years before that run of dominance, though, Rodón was an injury-plagued, ineffective mess, logging a meager 42.1 innings with a 5.74 ERA.
In fact, he pitched so poorly that the White Sox non-tendered him after 2020, eventually re-signing him to a one-year, $3 million deal two months later after no one else wanted him.
In his first year with the Yankees, Rodón looked a whole lot more like his 2019-20 self than his 2021-22 self.
He missed the first three months with a forearm injury that became a back injury, missed a couple of weeks in August with a hamstring injury and pieced together a 6.85 ERA around those absences.
His negative-0.9 bWAR mark wasn't even worst among Yankees pitchers in 2023, with Luis Severino bringing up the rear at a negative-1.5. But it was quite bad.
Did the Yankees buy a $162 million lemon, or will Rodón emerge as the strong second fiddle to Gerrit Cole?
5. Javier Báez, Detroit Tigers
6 of 10
2024 Salary: $25 million
Contract for 2025 and Beyond: 3 years, $73 million
2023 Stats: .222/.267/.325, 9 HR, 59 RBI, 12 SB
It's never a good sign when an entire fanbase is kind of hoping one of its players will opt out of the remainder of his contract, but Javier Báez was unwilling to grant that wish to the Tigers faithful, staying in Detroit for another $98 million over the next four years.
After hitting 31 home runs with an .813 OPS in a 2021 contract year spent between the Cubs and Mets, Báez hit a combined total of 26 home runs with a .633 OPS in his first two seasons with the Tigers.
Even worse, he was markedly less productive in 2023 than he was in 2022, posting a .267 on-base percentage last season, good for dead last among players who had enough plate appearances to qualify for a batting title.
(And, like, it wasn't even close. Give Báez 12 more plate appearances in which he reaches base in every one of them, and he still would've ranked dead last in OBP.)
A not-inconsequential factor in Báez's ranking here is that it's happening to Detroit.
Put this $24.5 million average salary on one of the payrolls in Los Angeles or New York, and it doesn't sting as badly. Báez isn't even making two-thirds of what Anthony Rendon makes on an annual basis with the Angels.
But in Detroit—where the Tigers just got out from under paying Miguel Cabrera $30-plus million and where the Opening Day payroll is projected to land below $136 million for the seventh consecutive year—it's extra painful.
The Tigers are currently allocating 22.4 percent of their 2024 payroll to Báez. To Detroit, his $25 million salary is the equivalent of $68 million in Yankees dollars.
4. Giancarlo Stanton, New York Yankees
7 of 10
2024 Salary: $32 million
Contract for 2025 and Beyond: 3 years, $86 million (plus a $25 million club option with a $10 million buyout for 2028) [Miami paying $10 million in each of 2026, 2027 and 2028]
2023 Stats: .191/.275/.420, 24 HR, 60 RBI
When Giancarlo Stanton signed his 13-year, $325 million contract during the 2014-15 offseason, he had just turned 25 and already had 154 home runs with a career OPS of .903 in five seasons.
For a while, he even out-performed that, posting a .908 OPS with 151 more home runs from 2015-18, including earning NL MVP honors in 2017.
Joining the 500 home run club seemed like a foregone conclusion, and 600 career dingers was at least on the table, if not the most likely outcome.
But injuries have left Stanton a shell of his former self and have rapidly turned this into one of the worst contracts in baseball.
When Stanton does get a hold of one, it still travels an absurd distance. On a 162-game basis, he averaged 42 home runs and 106 RBI over the past two seasons.
However, Stanton has missed at least 32 percent of Yankees games in four of the past five seasons. He posted a career-worst (by nearly 60 points) OPS of .759 in 2022 before dropping another 64 points last season, resulting in a combined total of negative-0.1 bWAR during that time.
Among the 212 players with at least 400 plate appearances last season, Stanton's .191 batting average was tied with Martín Maldonado for dead last, and his .275 on-base percentage was eighth-worst.
At least Maldonado provides value on defense. Stanton is almost unplayable in the field at this point, with New York coincidentally losing all 14 games in which he logged a complete game in the outfield in 2023.
At least Stanton plays more often than not, though, and puts a ball into orbit about once per week. That keeps him ahead of a few severely sunk costs.
3. Kris Bryant, Colorado Rockies
8 of 10
2024 Salary: $28 million
Contract for 2025 and Beyond: 4 years, $108 million
2023 Stats: .233/.313/.367, 10 HR, 31 RBI
As is the case with Javier Báez, Kris Bryant's contract feels more than a little extra painful because of the market he's in.
Bryant's $28 million salary isn't quite 22.4 percent of Colorado's 2024 payroll, but 19 percent is an awful lot.
While we're talking percentages, since those two former Cubs signed their respective nine-figure contracts, Bryant has played in 43.6 percent as many games (122) as Báez has (280). He has also been worth negative-0.6 bWAR to the Rockies compared to Báez's at least respectable mark of 3.1 bWAR.
For the 42 games Bryant was actually available in 2022, he was solid. He didn't homer quite like we expected for a guy playing home games at Coors Field, but his batting average (.306) was the best of his career, and his OPS (.851) was nothing to sneeze at.
But while appearing in nearly twice as many games last year, Bryant was a mess, hitting .233 with a .680 OPS.
Save for struggling through his 34 games played in 2020, it was the worst showing of his career, and by a country mile.
Maybe in 2024 he reverts to hitting like he did in 2022—or even slugging like he did en route to the 2015 NL MVP. But at this point in the Rockies portion of his career, Bryant needs to re-prove he can play at anything close to an All-Star level before we can assume it might happen.
2. Anthony Rendon, Los Angeles Angels
9 of 10
2024 Salary: $38 million
Contract for 2025 and Beyond: 2 years, $76 million
2023 Stats: .236/.361/.318, 2 HR, 22 RBI
When Anthony Rendon played for the Washington Nationals, he earned the nickname "Tony Two Bags," because of his propensity for ranking among the MLB leaders in doubles.
Since signing his seven-year, $245 million contract with the Los Angeles Angels, though, he has become "Tony Two Months," since that's all the months he's going to play in any given season, averaging 50 games played over the past four years.
Sure, one of those was the truncated 2020 campaign. He played in 87 percent of games that year and finished 10th in the AL MVP vote.
Over the past three seasons, however, Rendon missed more than twice as many games (338) as he has played (148). He hasn't been productive when he does play, either, posting a .701 OPS with 13 home runs in what almost amounts to a full season.
Last week, former teammate Jonathan Papelbon—who has never been shy about stirring the pot, so, you know, consider the source—said that Rendon "literally hates baseball," following Rendon's recent comments (somewhat said in jest) about the MLB season being too long.
Rough sledding for one of the highest-paid players in the game—a guy who is annually compensated as though he should be 95 percent as good as Aaron Judge.
1. Stephen Strasburg, Washington Nationals
10 of 10
2024 Salary: $23.6 million
Contract for 2025 and Beyond: 2 years, $47.2 million (plus $80 million in deferred money paid from 2027-29)
2023 Stats: Did not pitch
For competitive balance tax payroll purposes, Stephen Strasburg's remaining contract is $35 million in each of the next three seasons. The $80 million deferred to 2027-29 won't count against Washington's CBT for those three years.
But the Nationals do need to pay him about $151 million over the next six years—plus another $60 million to Max Scherzer and another $35 million to Patrick Corbin—which is nothing short of brutal.
By now, you know the deal with Strasburg, as he has been atop virtually every "bad contracts" article for the past several years. He hasn't officially retired yet, but assuming he never makes it back to an MLB mound because of complications from thoracic outlet syndrome, Washington will have spent $245 million for 31.2 innings with a 6.89 ERA.
From the moment Strasburg signed the contract, it felt like a colossal risk. He was sensational in 2019, especially during Washington's run to a World Series title. However, he was already 31 years old and had battled injury throughout his career. (Aside from the Tommy John surgery in 2010, it was never particularly serious injury. But it was always something.)
No one could have imagined it would blow up in Washington's face this disastrously, though.
If you're wondering why it is taking so long for Blake Snell—who has logged 130 or more innings pitched in a season just twice in his career—to sign what will be a massive contract, look no further than Strasburg.
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