These young MLB players are strong candidates for long-term extensions

There were several young players — including two who had yet to reach the big leagues — who signed long-term contract extensions shortly before or after Opening Day, most notably Konnor Griffin and the Pirates, Kevin McGonigle and the Tigers and Pete Crow-Armstrong and the Cubs.All of these contracts are significant for the MLB clubs that handed them out, and the reasons are two-fold. First, with most of these contracts, the teams are signing players through their first two or three free-agent years, and second, they are getting the players for their arbitration years at today’s prices and getting their free-agent years at savings that could be in the tens of millions of dollars. When a small-market team like the Pirates secures a player like Griffin for nine years, it prevents the bigger-market teams from signing him away in six years. That’s monumental for the Pirates.Advertisement