Tom Haudricourt has the details on Ryan Braun’s new extension. It’s a tricky one, because it’s not yet known whether Braun will be arbitration-eligible after the 2009 season. It won’t be known for sure until November of ’09. If he is arb-eligible at that time he’ll make an extra $6MM.
It’s looking like Braun will earn $4.5MM (including a signing bonus) for his three pre-arb years. Then he’ll get $18.5MM for his three arb years (less than 80% of what Hanley Ramirez will get for the same slice of his career). After that Braun gave up his first two free agent years for $22MM. That’s also significantly less than Ramirez will receive his first two years of free agent eligibility.
