Former top-100 prospect Andy Pages established himself as an everyday player in his second Major League season, batting .272/.313/.461 with 27 homers over 624 plate appearances for the Dodgers in 2025. Now settled in as the regular center fielder, Pages’ spot in the team’s plans has yet to truly extend into their longer-term future, as The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya reports that the Dodgers “have not broached any extension talks with” Pages and his reps at PRIME.
Pages is controlled through the 2030 season already, so he’ll be 30 when he is eligible for free agency in the 2030-31 offseason. There’s no rush for Los Angeles to necessarily lock Pages up already, though since he is on pace to achieve Super Two status and an extra year of arbitration eligibility, an extension would allow the Dodgers to gain some cost certainty over what might be a sharply increasing price tag through Pages’ four arb years.
Then again, money isn’t exactly a pressing concern for the big-budget Dodgers. This same willingness to spend is also a potential reason to forego an extension, as L.A. might want the flexibility to pivot to another top free agent or trade target in the outfield. For instance, the outfield wasn’t necessarily a huge area of need for the club this winter, yet the Dodgers still broke the bank for a four-year, $240MM deal with Kyle Tucker (with $30MM in deferred money and two opt-out clauses).
If Pages “only” continues his 2025 level of production going forward, that still means the Dodgers have a 4.1 fWAR player who contributes above-average (113 wRC+) offense and decent glovework in center field. That doesn’t mean Los Angeles couldn’t move Pages into a corner outfield role if a star center fielder becomes available, or if Tucker opts out or if Teoscar Hernandez isn’t retained when the guaranteed portion of his contract is up after 2027. The Dodgers also have a long list of highly-touted outfield prospects in the pipeline, so any or all of Josue De Paula, Zyhir Hope, Eduardo Quintero, James Tibbs III, or Mike Sirota could soon be on the radar for big-league duty.
This being said, the Dodgers haven’t been shy about locking up players they view as key roster pieces. It could be that the team wants to see one more full year of production from Pages before exploring an extension, just to give the team a little more data. Not that the Dodgers would put more weight on the small sample size of the postseason over the longer sample of regular-season play, but L.A. might also want to see how Pages rebounds from a dreadful .211 OPS over 55 playoff plate appearances in 2025.
The Dodgers are absolutely stacked. They simply do it all, and they do it good. Any other team would love to have one of these outfield prospects and the Dodgers have 5 of them. I mean, Tibs III was traded for a half season of complete bust Dustin May. While Sirota was acquired with the Dodgers giving up the very blah, Gavin Lux. Tickle Sanchez excited, baby. They Dodgers are here and they are here to stay.
They’re spending ~$600 million this year. There are plenty of teams with payrolls one-fifth that amount. They gave one player nearly a billion dollars.
They are the reason a salary cap is coming.
There isn’t a salary cap coming. Calm yourself.
A salary cap helps owners, not teams or fans of teams.
They do it good? Or do it well?
A salary cap helps small market teams compete. It would have to come with substantial revenue sharing, so the owners wouldn’t profit from it.
They need to make it mandatory to invest revenue sharing into the payrolls of the teams who receive it. That would go a longer way towards competitive balancing than a hard cap.
False. Owners who aren’t greedy help small market teams
There’ll be no baseball in 2027 because 25 of the 30 owners — and their tool, Rob Manfred — will demand a salary cap.
I think that large market teams shouldn’t stop spending. Small market teams should START spending. We can live with a tougher penalty soft cap and floor.
Then who are the other 5 owners?
Dodgers, Mets, Yankees, Jays, Giants. Maybe Padres, Cubs and Angels.
I don’t get why the Giants and Angels are on here. Could you please explain?
They will not cancel baseball. They don’t want to lose that year of profits just to quibble over what’s really just pennies in comparison.
So the 25 owners who are already crying poor and want a salary cap are for sure going to be fine with canceling the season and losing even more money?
Why does revenue sharing have to go to Payroll? Payroll is not the only expense that teams have. Small markets have to still pay the same stadium expenditures that big markets have. Fans aren’t going to come to dilapidated stadiums and small markets have less success getting cities to pay for the venue.
ctbronx7
25 of the 30 owners will demand a salary cap.
=====================
Why is that? By my accounting:
9 teams are over the cap. Why would they vote against their best interests?
You have 12 teams that have no interest in bidding for the top FAs. Why would they vote against their best interests?
Assuming that the players would accept a cap, which they won’t, the MLB will have to kick in a lot of money elsewhere to offset that. IMHO, the owners will make a lot of noise and a lot of demands, but will use the salary cap issue as leverage for other demands, like expanded playoffs.
Do you really believe that la1rge markets don’t make the most profit? Dodgers get $350mm for their broadcast rights. Detroit was getting $60mm before the “Fan Duel” bankruptcy. Estimates are now $30-40mm with their new MLB contract. That’s about 1/10th of LA, but you say the owner is greedy while spending 1/3 of LA Payroll?
It’s the one thing people complain about when their small market team has a fire sale every 3 years/doesn’t sign a big name. I just want them to shut up.
Small market teams get a crap load of money from ALL the other teams! THEY DON’T SPEND!🙄
@Theo….They do it “gooder!”
When people refer to themselves in third person, grammar may not be high on their list of priorities.
Because revenue sharing is so you can compete
Differences are so large between the markets that they should just create a 12 superteam league with no restrictions and no revenue shearing.
Have the other 18 teams shear what they want or move to Cuba.
Small market teams cah compete now they just want to pocket the profits they make instead of spending it
Gooder*
of sharing- with a cap and a floor. The sharing makes the floor something the small markets can live with.
I mean, oh well. It works for other sports.
Not happening.
Red Sox, Phillies, Braves, Rangers and Astros belong on the list. Also no reason Cardinals, Mariners, White Sox, and honestly the Marlins aren’t spending.
How much of that $350 million goes to the poor teams in the form of luxury tax payments?
Just as a matter of accuracy, the Dodgers’ media contract is worth an average of $325M over 25 years, starting lower, ending higher. How much they are receiving now is unknown, but it is probably still on the lower side of the average because they have yet to reach the contract’s midpoint. Also, nearly half of all media revenue is pooled and shared equally (somewhat less for the Dodgers because of the intervention of the bankruptcy court).
So, two points: First, whenever a rich team gets richer, so do the less-rich teams. Second, the financial side of baseball is almost completely opaque. So we can guess at team profitability, but we can really only guess. All we can know for certain is that the structure of baseball’s finances virtually guarantees a return on investment for every team owner.
Wrong. Baseball is doing better than it has in decades. The Padres are about to be sold, and for 3 to 4 billion dollars. You heard that right.. the Padres. Waaaaay too many dollars lost if even an inning gets missed.
There is no cap. There aren’t 9 teams over it. There is a collective bargaining tax threshold. There are 9 teams over the CBT threshold.
They both have tons of money and market.
No cap is coming but local TV deals will die.
All the “baseball needs a salary cap” proponents need to realize that it won’t save baseball, it will make it worse.
1.) like we see Toronto and LA already do, massive signing bonuses followed by deferred money. Teams in big markets can offer huge signing bonuses, which is taxed where a player lives, not plays. Deferrals are the same. Deferrals help the luxury tax situation because of depreciation. Because there are no rules in place, a big market team can defer x amount of money but replace that depreciation value with a massive signing bonus (see LA and Tucker) bringing the AAV down while still paying the player the same amount.
2.) Marketing. Baseball is still a regional sport with very players holding national appeal. Again, take the Dodgers who wisely have created such a massive international brand, that a player can make say 10 million a season per contract but earn so much more in marketing and merch sales playing in LA.
3.) players will chase rings, not contracts. Like we see in basketball, some players will take less money to chase a ring. Giving bigger markets the edge some more.
The way to “fix” baseball isn’t a salary cap, it’s by changing the way teams get amateur talent. International draft needs to be instituted. Local tv deals need to end. Qualifying Offer system needs to be abolished and replaced with:
If you pay the luxury tax regardless, signing a player making x amount causes you to lose a draft pick.
If you do not pay the luxury tax, signing a player does not require draft pick forfeiture.
If a non-luxury tax paying team loses a free agent that signs for x amount, they get draft pick compensation regardless
If a luxury tax paying team loses a player, they do not get draft pick compensation.
I actually think this change to the QO would be widely accepted by the players and the league because the players would no longer have the “punishment” of being tied to draft pick forfeiture and small to mid market team would no longer have to give up their draft picks to sign quality players.
By eliminating blackouts on streaming, local tv deals will die in a good way. Teams would be a more equal slice of the pie as they get to split all the “tv” revenue equally. Again, allowing them to spend more equally. Another option, instead of local deals being a 52/48 the teams way, change it to 75/25 or something closer to that going the leagues way.
@itsa
All you have to do is look at the nhl, nfl, and nba to see that caps don’t work, you’ll always have owners that want to win and will spend to win and owners that put very little in and just reap the profits.
Deferrals have no impact whatsoever on the CBT. None at all. To believe that they do is to get a big red F in financial literacy. There’s no “depreciation” either. They are loans from the player to the team. They are described this way in the CBA. You could look it up.
If teams offering deferred salaries can pay players more than the market, it is because the money the teams borrow from the player is repaid at the modest rate of annual interest set by the CBA. The teams can then invest that borrowed money to earn more on it than they have to pay when the loan comes due. Every team has an equal opportunity to do this.
MLB cannot simply “eliminate” blackouts. These local broadcast rights were sold to media companies for big bucks. Getting them back requires repaying these companies those big bucks, and not only for what they paid to acquire them, but for the advertising revenue they expected to get from them. Who is going to foot this bill? Nobody.
We don’t know a lot about the internal workings of MLB, but we can see the results. The 30 owners have created a financial system that keeps all of them profitable. And believe it or not, this is their reason for being in the baseball business. When the big teams spend and make more money, the smaller teams get a taste. Fans who assume that the smaller market team owners are angry about this system are missing the point: Your priorities as a fan are NOT the same as the priorities of your local franchise owner.
The Mets actually have the higher payroll this year. Not just the Dodgers causing the salary cap. The low spending teams causing problems also. Salary cap NOT GONNA HAPPEN. get it in your head. Players will never agree.
No salary cap is coming. Besides the points others have mentioned here my biggest point is simple. With 9 teams already over the luxury tax bracket those 9 kill the deal or they simply turn around and say fine you want a cap you get no more revenue sharing from us. I can see a soft floor being developed but no hard cap because owners want to protect their profits and they lose them with a strike, big spenders refusing revenue sharing etc. Ownership may be split but as long as almost a 1/3 of the teams are pouring money into revenue sharing by their being over the luxury threshold the smaller market teams are held over the proverbial barrel by any threat of losing revenue sharing from large market teams.
A salary cap isn’t coming. All that will happen is tougher penalties for going over the highest levels of the current soft cap that MLB has.
In reality, it can happen only if MLB opens its books to the MLBPA. This has been the sticking point in the last two CBA negotiations and will very likely be again next time. MLB will tell the players “trust us” — and the union will say fine, if we can verify. To which MLB will say no, as they always have.
The other 3 OF prospects are the real prizes here- De Paula, Hope and Quintenero are all top 25 prospects on various lists (as high as nearing top 10 some places to as far back as bottom half of top 100 in others- but they are all 18-20 year olds who have to compete with each other long term- so the variance will be huge). With that level of talent in the minors- you keep your options open.
Weird non-story
The dog that didn’t bark.
The boy who cried wolf.
Different story, different concept!
Hardly any transaction news at the moment unless you care about quad-A depth guys getting claimed.
Not every young player gets an extension.
but a guy as good as Pages often at least gets a good offer to do so. Dodgers are just built different.
If anything, it is a reminder that to get a big contract you almost need called up before you hit 23 otherwise you do not hit FA until you are 30- so a big extension or new contract is normally not in the cards. For Pages, FA at 30 means he likely has an earning potential that looks a lot like Cedric Mullens.
I am shocked they have a spot or playing time for any additional players at this point.
15 years/$600M w/ $300M deferred.
Shocked, shocked!
No need to rush, as the article says. He’s learning, gaining experience, and winning rings. And if they trade him, he’ll make great money elsewhere. With the Dodgers getting high end prospects in return, of course.
Wins all the way around.
True, and the Dodgers don’t extend controlled players very often. Other than Smith I can’t remember any others recently.
Muncy just got an extension this offseason .. Betts got one a couple years ago … didnt Kershaw i believe get an extension before his last nig extension ran out.
Or are you talking about pre / arbitration eligible
The latter, involving a buyout of arbitration seasons. I can’t think of anyone other than Smith getting one of those from the Dodgers in recent years. The Dodgers really aren’t big on doing them, so the fact that they haven’t made Pages a buyout offer a year away from arbitration eligibility seems like saying something we didn’t expect to happen, hasn’t happened.
funnily enough it looks like Muncy is also the answer .. they bought out his 3 arbitration years and then the extensions
Betts was in the final year of control
I believe he was already playing on an extension from Boston when the Dodgers traded for him.
Are you sure? The Dodgers signed him as a free agent in 2017. It was a minor league contract so it would (I believe) have preserved arbitration years. Either way, a long time ago now. So it hardly disproves the point.
the Betts deal is always going to be a funky one. Basically the extension was the first big contract coming out of COVID- so was the “everyone is back in business” deal at the time. Betts had stated he wanted to hit FA to set the market (and he is a big union guy); he never went on record about this- but i assumed he realized how important signing an extension that was what everyone would have called market pre covid was a huge deal post covid (and being the first notable one at that time).
Not sure I see any funkiness in the Betts deal. He was traded, then extended. The same was done with Glasnow. The only reason Betts came into this conversation is over the question of whether the Dodgers bought out any of his arbitration seasons. My recollection is no, but the Red Sox did.
Betts was traded and resigned a month before COVID shutdowns happened.
but I heard here on MLBTR that they haven’t produced any players of note since Will Smith
Right, so Pages would be the other side of that bookend? Pages would be the first since Will Smith?
I guess Lux was interesting for a bit, but who am I missing? Their big players have all been FA or trade since Smith emerged, unless you’re just VERY bullish on Dalton Rushing or Alex Freeland.
Or you’re just trying to be rude to the providers of free, EXCELLENT baseball content of which you consume regularly enough that you have registered a username, read/skimmed the articles, and taken the time to comment.
_Or you’ve doubled back/gone full circle and have come back around the other side of the sarcasm globe._
Either way MLBTR isn’t wrong to say they haven’t produced players of note since Smith, that timespan being “ended” by the emergence of Pages’ 2025.
by commenters, not writers
dammit, I knew I shouldn’t have posted
to be fair the dodgers are such a weird team in development recently. They have a ton of SP that looks good in the bigs- but the turn over is just silly. They have like 8 guys who should be the 4 or 5 guys on a rotation on upside alone- but they have nowhere to put them all. They get so many high end free agents they have no ability to give guys like Freeland good run to get their feet under them.
No ability? Freeland is getting the first two months before Edman is back to get his feet under him. They could have easily had Kim there instead.
Freeland will definitely get his runway, though I wonder how long it will be. Edman is still on the 10-day IL. So maybe not a full two months.
Also, the Dodgers approach to development isn’t so weird. They are always going to get low draft picks, which they can supplement by trading for prospects from depth. This is at least partially how they’ve kept the pipeline stocked.
i’ll take his awful post season OPS just for that catch he made in game 7.
@Michael Pages also hit that dribbler back to the mound vs the a Phillies that won them the NLDS.
They haven’t extended anyone still in arbitration since Will Smith and hadn’t extended anyone before Smith for quite some time (again, for arb-eligible players).
I only see them extending Pages only after at least 1 arb year. Teams that extend want to control costs. The dodgers want to control optionality in case of player regression
It’s just a vibe but I don’t see them extending him. That said, I’m basing this off of the Yankees’ general reticence to extend vs acquire. The benefit to extending him through arb would be to eat FA years in order to, as you said, control costs. Unless they get an absolute “California Love” deal they’ll wait another year to see if he really is a 4WAR guy, or if he’s a 2.5WAR guy with upside.
Also isn’t he an injury concern? I may be 100% wrong on that.
The owners of the Blue Jays is Rogers Communications.
They are were primarily a cell phone and cable TV company.
Smart business practices have them diversified in sports teams and their stadiums…providing the content for their networks.
They are not a bank.
Sound arguments require correct information and data.
Hey, we’ve all been there. Who among us hasn’t stumbled home from Charlie’s and the Brown Jug at 430am only to realize they haven’t yet prepared for this morning’s 9am Civil Procedure course. Hoping the professor doesn’t call on me. Pages and pages to go.
Most of my students play video games at night, glad some of you still go bar hopping!
No need to extend him yet. He won’t get super expensive until around arb2/arb3 if he keeps up his performances. Even then the Dodgers print money basically.
And let’s not forget. Before the start of the 2020 season, the Dodgers and Angels had a deal in place that would have sent Pages, Ross Stripling, and Joc Pederson for like Luis Renigfo. But Arte nixed it at the last second. More great Angel baseball!
smart man, I wouldn’t want to have to acquire Joc Pederson either
_(this isn’t a real comment)_
Pages isn’t a game changer. They’ll keep him for another year or two before they trade him and load up the year in and year out, best farm system in the game. By then another AAA stud will be ready for the big leagues and the process will keep going.
Pages is a game changer. His defense and power are huge in the bottom of the line up
Pages both Is and Isn’t a Game Changer until observed, collapsing the Game Changing Quantum Waveform into his performance.
3rd best CF in baseball behind Julio and PCA right now.
I’d quibble and throw him into a pool that also includes Chourio and Rafaela, and healthy Buxton is better – but I get that “healthy” is a qualifier.
Pages is good, but he’s the 3rd best CF in his own division, much less MLB.
Merrill and… Kim? I’d love if you were talking about Doyle but you’re not talking about Doyle.
I thought Carroll was still a CFer… shameful.
Yeah see my post above and the follow up. Not a game changer? He CHANGED game 7!
Slow news night….
Extending Pages for his arb years or perhaps arb +1 (2030 – 2031) makes good sense from a financial planning point of view.
But the OF future is too fluid to justify locking Pages in past that.
Teo drops off after 2027. Tucker has an opt out in his contract. There are 5 highly rated OF prospects in the minors who are all under team control past 2030.
They can be traded for need or developed for use.
In any event, the Dodgers have an enormous surplus of talent available for use as outfielders starting next year and extending into the next 5 years.
It would make sense for LAD to extend Pages if he keeps up his production. Brings them some certainty as to who will lead their outfield in the event Tucker runs off in the next couple of years.
Agreed, big If – smaller markets would need to gamble on that 4WAR. The Dodgers can afford to wait another year and end up having to add a gross $20M to the total contract value if he repeats, and dodge the bad investment if he doesn’t.
Terry Pratchett boots analogy etc
Terry Pratchett! I have read all the Disc Worlds.
Love ’em.
But I don’t get the boots reference.
It’s “The Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
the rich man buys nice boots for 100 bucks, they last him for 10 years
the poor man doesn’t have 100 bucks so he buys cheap boots for 20 bucks, and they wear out after a year, so he has to replace them 10 times @ 20 bucks a pop
So after 10 years, the Rich man has spent 100 bucks to be booted the whole time, while the Poor man has spent 200 bucks for the same.
Basically it’s expensive to be poor
His salary in arbitration will be based on his production. If at any point the team decides to buy out any player’s arbitration years, both the team and the player are guessing at the player’s future production.
Pages is under team control through 2030. If Pages and any of the 5 prospects show high quality then the Dodgers will happily waive bye bye to Tucker if he opts out. In any event they need to get younger.
Teo, Muncy, Freddie and even Mookie are in the tail end of their brilliant careers.
Dodgers have a million talented OF in the minors. Zyhir , josue, kendall george, tibbs, quintero, sirota, davalan.…
+dodgers will probly go out & sign some star FA so pages will be lucky to remain on the tm for much longer… possibly a trade candidate maybe for a SP or infielder
Does the Dodgers Ownership group think they’re Oprah? You can an extension and you get an extension. Everyone gets an extension. May as well restructure everyones contracts and tack on a 100 million for each player. Give Dave Roberts a 15 year deal for 450 million dollars only 375 million would be deferred
Um, what?
Dodgers haven’t extended a single player with >2 years of team control and that was Smith
Pages is good and perhaps underrated, but I really don’t see the need to lock him up at all, especially on a team like the Dodgers.
5 years/200 million sounds about right.
There’s no rush to sign him to an extension right now. I want to see him for another year or two before offering him one.