In my article from last December, Did the Mets overpay for Juan Soto?, I shared an analysis of all the signings of the biggest free agents (3.0+ WAR) going back to 2018. I compared the expected annual WAR of recently signed position player free agents (or free-agent-eligible players who were extended) to the average annual salary they got in their contracts. (I used the average of bWAR and fWAR, and because some players missed parts of seasons, I adjusted everyone’s WAR to a 150 game season.) I plotted the values of millions of dollars per WAR for each player against the year in which they signed or extended. I adjusted everything to 2024 dollars.

Juan Soto was the biggest overpay according to that plot.

After making that plot, and noticing a strong age-related trend, I made another plot that adjusted for age at the time of the signing. This was a plot of millions of dollars in annual salary per WAR over expected. Soto was not the highest on this plot, but near it, and he seemed to reset the market a bit. Most players this offseason have signed at “the high end of normal”.

And when I then heard that Alex Bregman had signed with the Red Sox for $40M a year, I added him to the plot, and said “Alex Bregman just blew all that out of the water”. But, I was wrong.

Here is the age-adjusted plot as I initially updated it, with Christian Walker, Teoscar Hernandez, and Alex Bregman added.

Yikes. This isn’t even close. Everyone else is within $2M/WAR of their expected value, whether above or below. Bregman was more than $3.5M/WAR over.

However, I then learned that much of his salary would be deferred, making his salary in terms of 2024 dollars around $31.7M per year. When I updated my charts with this new number, things became reasonable again. Here is the corrected version:

He’s near the top, but no longer an extreme outlier – almost not an outlier at all.

Things look even better for Bregman in the non-age-adjusted plot. Here is the initial, non-age-adjusted plot, with Bregman, Walker, and Hernandez added. Bregman’s contract had been the biggest overpay even without the age adjustment …

… but after switching from the nominal $40M AAV to the Competitive Balance Tax value of $31.7M a year, he’s down into the pack:

And given the very short term of the contract, being older at the time of signing matters less, because they’re all prime years.

If you want to see the numbers behind this plot, here is the updated chart of data that I worked from, with Christian Walker, Teoscar Hernandez, and Alex Bregman added.

I had Bregman’s expected pay per year at $24M to $25M, based on his trend in WAR values. So the $40M number was shocking. But the $31.7M sounded reasonable, especially given the short 3-year term for the deal, and the opt-outs. And the fact that the big contracts for Masataka Yoshida and Trevor Story would be due to come off the books at the same time – it makes it look as though the Red Sox are aiming to get back under the luxury tax threshold for 2028.

What I didn’t factor in, though, is that Bregman is worth more to a team than his WAR indicates. He is the ultimate unofficial player-coach, on a team with so many young, new players who can use exactly that. He challenges young players to prepare in ways they’d never imagined before. He talks a ton to every player and has a lot of good advice.

So what I’d initially called the “biggest overpay in recent history” by far, now looks like a completely reasonable contract.

I’m sorry Red Sox, and Alex Bregman, for my previous harsh words on this.