A’s Continue Busy Offseason with Lawrence Butler Extension

Something might be brewing in Sacramento. The 2024 A’s beat expectations by a mile, though expectations were admittedly muted coming off of a disastrous 2023, and this offseason has seen the club be quite busy. The team’s best player, Brent Rooker, signed an extension that will keep him around through at least 2029, well past when the A’s are scheduled to move to Las Vegas. The pitching staff looks much improved, thanks to the surprise signing of Luis Severino and a trade for Jeffrey Springs. And now last year’s second-best player, Lawrence Butler, has signed a contract extension too:

BREAKING: Outfielder Lawrence Butler and the A’s are in agreement on a seven-year, $66.5 million contract extension with one club option, sources tell ESPN. Butler, 24, broke out as a rookie last year and is seen as a foundational player for the A’s moving forward.

— Jeff Passan (@jeffpasan.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T04:22:52.566Z

A year ago, this contract would have been mind-boggling. Butler debuted in the bigs in 2023 with an uneven two months of work. His minor league track record suggested intriguing upside – he flashed excellent power while climbing the ranks and was only in a position to struggle in the majors because he’d reached Triple-A at age 22 – but like so many A’s, he was a question mark, a talented youngster with some good signs and some red flags.

The A’s started 2024 hot, at least by their standards, but Butler didn’t. After breaking camp with the team, he ran into a huge power outage. Over 121 plate appearances, he managed just two homers en route to a .179/.281/.274 slash line, so the A’s sent him back down to Triple-A. What can you do? Sometimes your 23-year-old who never played above A-ball until a year ago needs a bit of extra seasoning.

But as it turns out, Butler was closer to a breakthrough than anyone thought. One thing that smart teams do when they’re in a down period is shuffle through a lot of hitters with potential hoping to see who sticks. That’s undoubtedly what motivated the A’s to push Butler to the majors so quickly in 2023, and also what led them to hand him a roster spot to start the season. And while Butler didn’t impress in his first crack at the job, the guys who got the second shot were no great shakes either. Seth Brown took on an expanded role when Butler returned to the minors and hit about as poorly as Butler had, only with worse defense; he’s also eight years older than Butler. J.D. Davis likewise played at a below-replacement clip and started to lose playing time as a result. So the A’s sent Brown down, released Davis, and recalled Butler and Tyler Nevin. Giving the 23- and 27-year-olds playing time over 31-year-olds is what you’re supposed to do when you’re searching for contributors, after all.

Butler gave them a few weeks of worry, no doubt, when his cold spell persisted even upon his re-promotion. But then he got his feet under him. From the start of July onwards, everything came together. He hit a scintillating .302/.346/.597 and smashed 18 homers in half a season’s playing time. That was good for a 167 wRC+, a top-15 mark across the majors over that time span.

What changed? Well, everything. The best way I know to explain how Butler was scarcely the same person is to look at his plate discipline. In his first go-round in the big leagues in 2024, he was far too hesitant to swing. He chased only 27% of pitches outside the zone (league average is 28.5%), which is good. But he also took far too many strikes – he swung at 60% of in-zone pitches (league average is 66%). And those in-zone pitches overmatched him; he made contact with a minuscule 76% (league average is 85%). The result was tons of swinging strikes, but also tons of called strikes. He simply didn’t look like he had the big leagues figured out yet.

But oh what a difference a few months can make. After his return, Butler looked like a completely different hitter. He was more aggressive, but in a good way. He chased 29% of balls, a small increase, but started swinging at 69% of pitches in the strike zone, a massive improvement. He started making in-zone contact at a league average rate. Despite swinging more frequently, his swinging strike rate declined. And now that he was attacking pitches in the zone and making contact, his plus power started to play up.

That power? It’s his best tool by a mile. His batted ball metrics would look right at home in the Home Run Derby. He has elite bat speed and uses it to put the ball in the air, launching barrels at a 75th-percentile clip. He was particularly adept at punishing sliders and cutters, crushing hangers without getting too chase-happy. You might expect someone as young and raw as Butler – again, his first taste of Double-A didn’t come until 2023 – to be vulnerable to bendy stuff, and he might still have some adjustments to make there if pitchers are consistently able to land good sliders for strikes. But the combination of 70-grade power and newfound in-zone aggression forced pitchers onto the back foot, and they weren’t able to find an adjustment that slowed Butler down.

That trajectory makes this contract extension particularly intriguing. You can’t luck into the results that Butler showed in the second half last year. Those exit velocities can’t be faked. Bad hitters don’t put up a slash line that good for that long. But I also feel safe in saying it’s not his true talent level, either, because there are only a handful of hitters in baseball that good. The question isn’t whether Butler can play, it’s where he’ll settle in.

ZiPS was quite low on Butler heading into last year, and reasonably so. He didn’t impress at any level in 2023, so the main thing he had going for him was low-minors performance and age, but those two factors are notoriously noisy. That said, projection systems will update quickly with new and solid information, which is exactly what happened here. Here are the ZiPS projections for the length of Butler’s deal with the A’s:

You don’t have to be a data wizard to understand that these projections come with wide error bars. Sure, they’re all between two and three wins, but would you be surprised if Butler put up five wins this year, or sinks down to one? That’s just how things go when a player looks overmatched one year and unbeatable the next. Maybe Butler has adjusted to the league and will keep mashing. Maybe a new approach from pitchers will blunt his success. Maybe he’ll develop a new gear. Maybe his plate discipline isn’t sustainable. There are just too many ways that you can be awful for your first 300 plate appearances and then great for your next 300 to have strong conviction about the thousands of plate appearances that both team and player hope he racks up in the years to come.

That variability is part of the appeal, though, and I think it speaks well to the way the A’s are rebuilding. If you want to build a sustainable winner without spending at the top of the league, contract extensions are an irreplaceable tool. The A’s are offering Butler something wildly valuable: certainty. He signed out of high school in 2018 as a sixth round pick, with a bonus of $285,000. He made minor league salaries for the next four years, got a big league check for part of the fifth, and then finally broke through to being a full-time big leaguer last year. In other words, almost all of his career earnings still lie in front of him.

Given that trajectory, it’s only natural that Butler would place a high premium on guaranteed compensation. You can think of it like an insurance policy. Sure, if he didn’t sign an extension and then backed up last year’s performance in 2025, he’d be looking at a much bigger payday. But what if he scuffles? What if he’s just league average, not a failure but not a breakout either? Maybe he could have signed an even bigger deal if he waited a few years and continued to excel, but $65.5 million makes you rich for life just as much as $100 million does. Flattening out his range of outcomes – $65.5 million in every scenario rather than a big payday if he succeeds and a much lower amount if he fails – is the A’s giving their player exactly what he wants in a way that also benefits them.

And that benefit to the A’s is obvious. You can’t make the playoffs without good players. If you’re doing it all with internal development, you’re at the mercy of randomness. Even if you pick the right guys, will they all reach the majors at the same time? Will their arbitration salaries cause a pinch elsewhere? Will you feel pressure to trade them before they hit free agency, knowing that your salary-constrained franchise is unlikely to retain them much longer?

The earlier you sign someone to an extension, the more this math changes. Let’s put it this way: Butler should never be willing to accept more of a discount to expected value than he is right now. The uncertainty about his career is going to go down after 2025, one way or another. His range of outcomes almost has to compress, because right now, he’s been either elite or unplayable. You can’t have a wider range than that.

Could this deal backfire on the A’s? I mean, sure. Did you read the part about how wide the error bars are? But taking risk is a necessary part of the game if you’re going to try to assemble a playoff team on the cheap. If Butler was a lock to play at an All-Star level going forward, the A’s probably couldn’t afford to extend him. He’d rightly want much more money than he got in this deal. That’s a good risk for the team, though. The contract hardly stops them from spending elsewhere – if they’re wrong, they’ll live. Butler’s average annual value is less than they’re paying José Leclerc to be their setup man this year.

Handing out pre-arb extensions and hitting on a few is an important part of building a sustainable winner. Want a counter-example? Consider the 2020 Oakland A’s, who won the AL West to make the playoffs for the third straight year. That team was star-studded; they’d done a great job of drafting and trading for players who blossomed in green and yellow. The offense was loaded. Matt Olson, Matt Chapman, Marcus Semien, Sean Murphy, and Mark Canha all played key roles. They had Liam Hendriks, Chris Bassitt, Sean Manaea, Jesús Luzardo, and Frankie Montas pitching for them. Hendriks fronted one of the best bullpens in baseball. That team wasn’t an upstart; it looked right at home in the playoffs.

But there was a problem: None of those guys were locked into good contracts. None of them had signed extensions, even. Whether it was because the players didn’t want to sign deals early in their careers or because the A’s didn’t offer them, they simply never got any traction extending core players at a level that was beneficial for both team and player.

That led directly to the next, sad chapter in the A’s saga, a messy teardown with no clear end in sight. The farm system wasn’t delivering; out of that list of players up above, only Luzardo and Murphy were still pre-arbitration in 2021. There were no anchor free agents, no veterans to build around. When the A’s realized they weren’t going to be able to sign their 2020 core to extensions, they traded them all away without getting much in return, setting the team back a half-decade.

Imagine how different things would be if one or two of those players had signed early-career extensions. The whole tenor of the franchise might have changed. And if you’re looking for an example of a missed early-career extension not being a huge deal, the 2020 A’s are also a great example. They traded for Stephen Piscotty and his six-year, $33.5 million deal, and he didn’t pan out; in his last four years in Oakland, he was below replacement level. But even the spendthrift A’s built an excellent team with Piscotty on the payroll, because that’s just how the math works. If an extension buys out pre-arb and early arbitration years, it’s almost certainly a low average annual value because of how the team control system works.

With both Butler and Rooker signing extensions this winter, the team’s situation looks much different this time around. If the youth around them coalesces into a playoff team over the next few years, the A’s will be able to build on it. If Butler is a star, they’ll have a huge tailwind in assembling a great team around him. Want to rise above the other 29 teams who are all trying to win baseball games? You need some contracts that have panned out well, and you can’t have those if you don’t take a little risk in extending a player before you’re sure that they’ll excel.

Even better, the A’s are supplementing that high-risk/high-reward strategy with their behavior in free agency. The A’s have a good mix of interesting hitters, and their willingness to give prospects plenty of rope in the major leagues and cycle through players until they find the right one helped both Butler and Rooker break out. They’re sticking to that plan, quite reasonably in my opinion. Aside from tiny, one-year deals with Gio Urshela and Luis Urías, they focused on pitching when looking outside the organization. Severino and Springs are, to some extent, the anti-Butler; their ceilings aren’t as high, but their floors aren’t as low.

Can those two pitchers turn a cellar dwelling team into a division winner? No. But they’re valuable nonetheless, likely four or so wins better than just throwing in minor leaguers in their stead. If Butler and Rooker are the new pillars of the team and one of their starting pitching prospects clicks, the A’s will be glad to have veteran help in the rotation to turn the team from an interesting but shallow collection of players into a full squad.

This combination strategy – trying for ceiling with contract extensions for homegrown players and floor when trading for major leaguers or signing free agents – makes a lot more sense to me than the old A’s plan. Is there risk? Sure. But if you don’t spend and don’t take risk, how are you planning on getting ahead? The median team in the major leagues doesn’t make the playoffs.

The A’s spent the last four years making all kinds of moves I didn’t agree with. They pinched pennies irrationally and tore down a contender without receiving the pile of top prospects that a rebuild normally nets. They somehow let the Brewers come away with the best player in the Sean Murphy trade. They cut payroll so much that if they hadn’t spent this offseason, they’d have in violation of the minimum salary spend necessary to receive revenue sharing and might have inspired an MLBPA grievance. Their owner antagonized the fans in Oakland and abandoned a city with an important baseball tradition, forcing the team to play in a minor league ballpark for years in the process. That all happened. Now they’re starting from a worse position – but at least they’re starting.

I hope the A’s keep trying to figure out which homegrown players will be part of their next playoff team. I hope they keep offering those guys life-changing money, even before their trajectories are certain. And I hope they keep supplementing their club intelligently on the open market. They aren’t going to try to be the Yankees or the Dodgers, but this new team-building approach feels like a great fit for the team – and of course, for Butler. Win-win deals, you’ve gotta love them.