Making sense of Bellinger's latest complicated free agency

It feels like we’ve been here before. It feels like we’re always here, actually, asking: Hey, what kind of player is Cody Bellinger? What kind of contract should he get?

It was the question after the disastrous 2021-’22 that got him non-tendered by the Dodgers. (He got one year, $17.5 million, from the Cubs, including a buyout.) It was the question again after the stunning rebound with the Cubs in 2023. (He got three years, $80 million, with two opt-outs.) It was still the question last year after the just-OK follow-up in 2024, after which he chose not to test the market again. (He then got traded to the Yankees for little more than simply taking on his remaining contract.)

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It is, after all that, somehow still the question, yet one more time, after a strong debut with the Yankees that led to him exercising his opt-out to become a free agent.

As the staredown with the Yankees (among others) continues, there’s at least one reason why a resolution to this situation seems to be taking its sweet time. (Relatively, anyway; remember that he didn’t sign with the Cubs in 2024 until Feb. 27.) Bellinger, without question, is a good player who can contribute to a winning team. But he’s also had one of the wildest up-and-down careers in recent history, with highs like “winning the NL MVP Award in 2019” and lows like “hitting .165” coming just two years later.

How do you game that out for future years? Let’s try to put ourselves in the minds of front offices doing exactly that.

It turns out, surprisingly, that it’s actually very easy to project what kind of player he’s going to be. The trick, it seems, is simply trying to put a value on that.

Bellinger, who turned 30 last summer, has lived more than a few baseball lives in his nine seasons in the Majors, and after that shocking turnaround in his first year with the Cubs, that was a big part of the difficulty in evaluating him that winter. How, we asked at the time, do you handle a hitter who within the course of a calendar year was A) so poor that the Dodgers simply cut him free and then B) so good that he got some down-ballot MVP support for the 2023 Cubs?

But that was two years ago. It’s not where we are now. While the last three seasons haven’t all been the same, they’ve all been solid to very good, and so the easiest way to do this is to say that the following two things can be true at the same time:

• Bellinger is not the massive power, big-strikeout hitter he was in 2017 (39 homers) and 2019 (47 homers), in part because that was a very long time ago and in part because those were the two record-breaking, homer-happy seasons where the ball was flying out of the yard all around the sport. You might remember 2019 as being the season when Alex Bregman hit 41 homers, and Gleyber Torres 38, and neither player has come anywhere near those totals since. After all this time, it’s probably safe to exclude those from future projections.

• It’s also nearly as safe to not worry too much about the horrendous 2021-’22 seasons, during which Bellinger was legitimately one of the weakest regular hitters in baseball. We can do that because we know how much of it was almost certainly due to injuries, including the dislocated shoulder that required surgery in the fall of 2020, the hairline fracture in his leg that he tried to play through in 2021, along with a hamstring injury and a fractured rib.

Don’t worry about any of that. Now that we have three consecutive prime-age, mostly healthy seasons, which all bear some similarities, it’s not all that hard to know what kind of player this version of Bellinger is. He’s going to make a lot of contact. He’s not going to swing that fast (20th percentile bat speed last year) or produce much hard-hit contact (26th percentile). The end result is above-average, at times very good, offense.

• 2023: 139 OPS+, 16% K rate
• 2024: 111 OPS+, 16% K rate
• 2025: 125 OPS+, 14% K rate

Three solid-to-very-good seasons to end his 20s. While the hard-hit, barrel and bat speed metrics are generally unimpressive, he’s also become one of the more difficult hitters in the game to strike out. He’s hit .281/.338/.477 across those years, with a 125 OPS+ that’s tied for 40th among qualified hitters, similar to Julio Rodríguez and Jose Altuve. That’s good enough for 11.4 FanGraphs WAR, which is tied for 30th.

Sometimes, things go right, and it’s a great year, as happened in 2023 when he strongly overperformed his expected stats and benefited from some very unsustainable success with two strikes. Sometimes, he gets hurt by a park that suddenly becomes very difficult for hitters, as happened in 2024, when he had an OPS 97 points worse at Wrigley; sometimes, he gets helped by a park that does exactly the opposite, as happened in 2025 when he had an OPS 194 points better in the Bronx.

(That last part is huge. He was a top-20 hitter at home last year, but outside the top 100 on the road. As we said in November, “at home, he hit something like Juan Soto. On the road, it was more like Miguel Vargas.” It all points toward the Yankees and Bellinger really, really needing to figure this out.)

But at the heart of it, he’s essentially been – and we can’t express how incredible this is to say after the path he took to get here – a reliable, consistent, above-average batter. While OPS+ tells you that in one way, Baseball Prospectus has a version of OPS+ called DRC+, which instead of looking only at the outcomes, tries to adjust for a number of different inputs to get to a ‘deserved’ rate. By that metric, Bellinger has been more or less the same above-average hitter for the past three years, roughly 8% better than average, with the outcomes showing some variance thanks to the effects of luck and ballpark.

Throw in the value of good defense at multiple spots – though that was inconsistent as well, rating as just-OK in 2023-’24, then very good in 2025 – and whatever added value you may place on making lots of contact, and you know exactly what kind of player he is. That player? An above-average bat who can play multiple positions well and might run into an excellent year.

This is why the projections, which take into account the last few years, as well as age, are saying somewhat similar things for the upcoming season as Bellinger hits his 30s: That he'll have a bat roughly 10% better than average, and a value of roughly 3 WAR. (That's probably subject to a little change based on whether he ends up in a good ballpark, since his less-than-thunderous bat does fit the profile for the type more affected by that.) All of which says that he’s something near the back end of the top 20 outfielders in 2026.

Knowing all that – the age, the shape of the production, the recent history, and the projections – we’re in a very different spot than in 2023, when we didn’t really know what kind of player he’d end up being. Now, we know exactly what kind of player he is. The question is: Are there comparisons we can make? There sure are.

Over the past three seasons, there have been 11 non-catchers who A) have been within roughly one year, either older or younger, of Bellinger’s age, and B) had an OPS+ between 110-130, where again 100 is league average, and C) posted at least 8 WAR.

One is Bellinger, obviously. A few others (Carlos Correa, J.P. Crawford, Austin Riley and Torres) play up-the-middle or left-side infield positions that make comparisons here somewhat messier.

Two more (Randy Arozarena and Ian Happ) are entering the final year of their contracts, with Seiya Suzuki and Jarren Duran following soon after. It’s the last two, then, who are the most interesting, both first basemen who signed new contracts this winter. Compare these metrics over the past three years:

• Bellinger: 125 OPS+, 73 HR, 11.4 WAR, turned 30 in July
• Player A: 130 OPS+, 118 HR, 8.4 WAR, turned 31 in December
• Player B: 125 OPS+, 68 HR, 8.1 WAR, turns 29 in June

Player A there is Pete Alonso, who signed a five-year, $155 million contract with Baltimore. Player B is Josh Naylor, who signed a five-year, $92.5 million contract to remain with Seattle after being traded there.

While Alonso is obviously not the same type of player – with far more power, yet far more strikeouts and a considerably lesser defender – it’s almost eerie how similar Naylor and Bellinger have performed over the past three seasons, with Bellinger hitting .281/.338/.477 with a 15% K rate and an 8% BB rate, and Naylor hitting … .280/.341/.468 with a 15% K rate and an 8% BB rate. Bellinger has five more homers, and four fewer stolen bases. If not for Bellinger's outfield glove and the fact that they look absolutely nothing alike, this would be a real-world Spider-Man meme.

Naylor doesn’t play the outfield, obviously, though he is a somewhat younger left-handed hitter, and he certainly doesn’t have the long-ago awards in his trophy case that Bellinger does. But the bats seem all but identical, with the huge advantage here being that Bellinger can play three outfield spots as well as first base, and Naylor is first base only. It’s why Bellinger has the advantage in WAR over the past three years; it’s why the projections like him better next year; it’s why he’s likely going to get a larger deal than Naylor did.

This case is, somehow, both confusing (Bellinger’s last half-decade has been a whiplash) and not (we know what kind of player he is now). It might come down to fit, then. The Yankees have an obviously beneficial home park. The Phillies, also desperately in need of an outfielder, have one that would make a ton of sense, too. You could even see a return to the Dodgers make some sense on both sides.

Ultimately though, we assume that if Bellinger wants one thing, it might be the same thing we all do: A long-term contract that gives him a reliable home for years to come. We’ve probably spent enough winters trying to figure this one out.