For the first time under general manager Mike Elias, the Baltimore Orioles have agreed to a long-term contract extension with a homegrown player. Samuel Basallo, a 21-year-old catcher just a week removed from his MLB debut, reportedly inked an eight-year, $67 million extension with the club on Friday. Escalators and incentives in the contract can push the full value to $88.5 million. The news was first reported by Andy Kostka of the Baltimore Banner.
This deal is a landmark moment for a franchise in dire need of an emotional boost. The 2025 season has been an unmitigated disaster for the Orioles. An exciting young core propelled the Birds to October in 2023 and ‘24, but injuries, underperformance and an overmatched starting rotation have this year’s outfit nine games under .500 and 14.5 games back in the division entering play Friday.
Baltimore’s disappointing tumble down the standings has put Elias’ job in the crosshairs, at least in some corners of the fan base. Most notably, the regime’s inability to reach a contract extension with any of its young, impact players has drawn ire and criticism from many around the game. In fact, before the completion of Basallo’s deal, the Orioles were the only MLB club to not have extended a single homegrown player since 2018.
While the futures of linchpins such as Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Jordan Westburg, Colton Cowser and Jackson Holliday remain uncomfortably hazy, Basallo’s extension is an unequivocal good in Baltimore.
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What type of player is this?
Basallo joined the Orioles as a 16-year-old during the 2021 international signing period. His $1.3 million signing bonus was a franchise record for the team. At the time, Basallo had huge power potential, but there were questions about his contact ability and whether he could stick behind the plate. He exploded onto the prospect scene with a breakout 2023 season in which he hit .313/.402/.551 across Low-A and High-A as an 18-year-old. An elbow issue impacted his 2024, but Basallo was phenomenal across 321 plate appearances in Triple-A this year, earning a big-league call-up last week.
His defense has made strides but is still considered the weakest part of his profile. Offensively, Basallo is a potential game-changer, the rare youngster capable of offering power and average. Stylistically, it’s an even larger version of Rafael Devers. Basallo is immensely powerful and short to the baseball. His tracked average bat speed across a week of MLB games already ranks in the top 10 league-wide.
Basallo chases more than is ideal, but he makes an impressive amount of contact for a player who has been extremely young for the level at every stage of his professional journey. If he can cut down on swinging outside the zone — a skill the Orioles’ hitting development group has a phenomenal track record of improving — Basallo could evolve into one of the sport’s premier power hitters.
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Why is this signing so significant for the Orioles?
Over the past few years, the O’s organization has received a good deal of flack for its abundance of white, American-born position-player prospects. A non-comprehensive list of homegrown Baltimore players includes a Gunnar, a Colton, a Heston, a Jackson, a Dylan and an Adley. The minor-league system features a Slater, a Griff and a Vance. FanGraphs’ 2024 O’s prospect list had just one Latin player ranked in the top 10: Basallo.
The origins of that dynamic precede Elias’ tenure. Former owner Peter Angelos was ideologically opposed and/or strategically averse to investing in the Latin American market. It is, to be fair, a complicated, messy world replete with under-the-table dealings and multi-million-dollar verbal agreements with players in their early teens. But while the rest of the league was identifying superstars such as Juan Soto, José Ramírez and Fernando Tatis Jr., the Orioles were sitting out emptyhanded, a conscientious objector losing a war.
That changed when Elias took over in the fall of 2018 and has changed even more as team ownership changed hands in the years since. Making inroads in the Latin market was an enormous priority in the early days of the Elias regime. Plans for a new Dominican academy were drawn up in 2019 and completed in 2022. Most crucially, the club began to invest in young Latin players again. Basallo, who received a record deal in 2021, represented the culmination of that new strategy.
Because it can take years for the international market to pay dividends, the club’s renewed interest in Latin America operated on something of a tape delay. Basallo’s first deal, for instance, was likely agreed to at some point in 2019 or 2020. He signed in 2021, didn’t come stateside until 2022 and didn’t debut until last week. Expect the Orioles to continue to matriculate more and more Latin prospects to the big leagues in the coming years.
Why Basallo? Why not the other guys?
Three of the Orioles’ premier young players — Jordan Westburg, Gunnar Henderson and Jackson Holliday — are represented by agent Scott Boras. That’s notable as Boras, considered the sport’s most influential agent, typically steers his clients away from contract extensions. There have been some exceptions — José Altuve, Matt Chapman, Stephen Strasburg — but on the whole, “Boras Guys” reach free agency more often than not.
That’s not to say the Orioles haven’t tried. The New York Post’s Jon Heyman reported earlier this year that new owner David Rubenstein had conversations with Henderson and his representatives during spring training. Unsurprisingly, considering Henderson’s status as one of the game’s most valuable young players, those talks were not fruitful.
Also, most of the time, contract extensions with promising top prospects are signed in the first few months after a player’s debut. That’s because otherwise the price skyrockets. Red Sox outfielder Roman Anthony inked a lengthy extension this year within the first two months of his career. The dollar figure was significantly lower than it might’ve been had Boston waited. That was the case with Kansas City’s Bobby Witt Jr., Seattle’s Julio Rodriguez and, most significantly, Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr. The more a player proves and the closer to free agency he gets, the higher the price climbs.
Don’t the Orioles already have a catcher?
Ah yes, the Rutschman in the room.
It has been a weird few years for the 2019 No. 1 pick. Rutschman was hailed as a franchise savior, a cornerstone catcher who could carry the Orioles to the promised land on his broad shoulders. He debuted to much fanfare in 2022 and produced an impressive 9.8 bWAR over his first two seasons. But Rutschman’s production fell off a cliff down the stretch last year, with an abysmal .585 OPS after the All-Star break. In 2025, injuries — he has had oblique, abdomen and concussion issues this year — have scuttled things. Rutschman is currently on the IL, which should give Basallo some valuable runway to develop behind the plate in the bigs.
But the Basallo extension does not mean the O’s are giving up on Rutschman. Far from it. Baltimore still sees Rutschman as a fundamental part of its roster and will give him every opportunity to rediscover his impact. Most likely, the team will employ a timeshare behind the plate next season, with both backstops also getting time at designated hitter and first base. There are indeed a handful of reasons to rethink what type of player Rutschman will be moving forward, but at least for now, it’s important to separate that from Basallo.
