The Padres Made a Genius Move This Morning (Thanks Maybe To Me?) And Gave 21 Year Old Stud Outfielder Jackson Merrill a Nine Year Contract Worth Up to $204M

Megan Briggs. Getty Images.

Last night after the Yankees bullpen blew their win I tuned into Padres-Guardians for a bit to watch some Michael King. The Fathers are off to a red hot start and are somehow keeping pace with the world-beater Dodgers.  Just good baseball being played by a group that could be torn apart by their front office at any given moment with their ownership power struggle that's on-going. 

Second year stud Jackson Merrill got things going for San Diego with this bomb to right-center. He's picked up right where he left off in 2024 when he nearly stole the NL ROY from Paul Skenes. He's such a stud in every way. 

The homer prompted me to suggest if the Padres should extend Merrill now before he reaches superstardom and becomes unaffordable. 

And then as I was headed to work this morning I get a Twitter notification from Meek Phil saying "turns out they listened" which out of context could mean ANYTHING. Turns out what I conjured up at night was happening just a few hours later. 

Really, really weird timing. While I do have my sources (see Bellinger, Goldschmidt, Cole TJ surgery), those are pretty closely tied to Yankees news. I had nothing here with Merrill, this was just insanely coincidental timing. AJ Preller, is your burner following me? Make it a little more obvious why don't ya? 

A+++ move by the Padres, even if they needed to see my tweet to pull the trigger. Merrill is already a stud and only going to get better. Now they give him a massive raise through his pre-arb and arb years before the Padres receive a likely big discount in his early FA years. There are some incentives that can kick the money over the $200M mark, and if they're hit the Padres will be happy to reward him. Merrill then gets to hit free agency at 30 years old and cash in for another huge payday. Just a no brainer deal by San Diego who might actually be bigger spends than we were led on. 

P.S. If we're gonna follow all of Eric's ideas how about we visit a trade concept for sending one or multiple of Tatis, Cease, King to the Yankees. Dom Smith goes back in return. 

P.P.S. As I was writing this the Red Sox extended their new rookie Kristian Campbell to a nice extension, 

Easy move for Boston which I'm sure their fans are beyond excited about considering what Campbell has shown so far and last year in the minors. I wonder if you're seeing more players do these type of deals because of the looming lockout at the end of next year. Just get your money while you can and don't try and be greedy. For the teams it's a no brainer, I wonder why Baltimore has yet to dip their toe in that kind of water.