Teams and players often agree to contract extensions during the spring, after the top free agents have signed and arbitration cases have been resolved. Extensions are all about comparables, especially when it comes to arbitration eligible players. Coming up with the relevant position, salary and service time data would have been a serious obstacle for most observers until MLBTR introduced an Extension Tracker.
The tracker shows all contract extensions, whether they cover the player's arbitration years, free agent years, or both. All the extensions are listed by date, and our filter button allows you to change the date range. You can also filter by any combination of team, position, guaranteed years, amount in millions, number of options, service time, super two status, and agency. The service time filtering allows you to choose one or both boundaries of a range. Service time is denoted as years.days, so 4.148 means four years and 148 days. The player name is hyperlinked to MLBTR's post on the story of the extension.
For example, if you wanted to put Chris Sale’s recent extension in context, you could search for all of the starting pitchers with two-plus years of service time who signed five-year deals of $25MM or more since 2008. That search turns up many similar deals, since Sale’s deal fits within a pre-established template for pitcher contracts.
The extension tracker can be found under the Tools menu in the navigation bar up top, along with our, Arbitration Tracker, Agency Database and Transaction Tracker. MLBTR also has iPhone/iPad and Android apps.
