The Giants made a major splash overnight, announcing that they’ve extended the contract of third baseman Matt Chapman. The deal guarantees Chapman $151M over six years and runs from 2025 to 2030, with a $25M annual salary and a $1M signing bonus paid out in 2025. According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, Chapman’s deal contains a no-trade clause.
Chapman, 31, signed with the Giants on a three-year deal worth $54M with opt outs after each season over the offseason when his market didn’t develop to expected levels last winter. In the months since then, it’s become apparent that the first of those opt-out opportunities would be exercised as the infielder has largely quelled his doubters with his best season in half a decade. His first season in a Giants uniform has seen him post a strong .247/.343/.445 slash line, good for a 118 wRC+, in 136 games. In addition to a strong season at the plate, he’s also put together his most impressive defensive season in years with +7 OAA and +13 DRS, his best showing in either metric since 2021.
With Chapman poised to return to free agency in search of a bigger contract, the Giants have now made sure that he’ll remain with the club for the foreseeable future. The third baseman’s deal figures to keep him in San Francisco through the end of his age-37 season.
The contract is representative of the potential upside that players who take opt-out laden deals can find if their initial foray into free agency doesn’t go according to plan. Chapman now figures to ultimately walk away from his time with the Giants having pocketed $169M over seven years, though of course this outcome required not only a healthy season from the 31-year-old but his best season overall since 2019.
By staying in San Francisco, Chapman ensures that he will spend the majority of his playing career in the Bay Area. The longtime Athletic was selected 25th overall by Oakland in the 2014 draft and made his debut with the club back in 2017. He’d ultimately spend the first five seasons of his career in an A’s uniform, earning three Gold Glove awards, finishing in the top 10 of AL MVP voting twice and making his first and so far only career All-Star game during that time.
When the A’s began a rebuild following the 2021 season, he was shipped to Toronto just before the 2022 campaign began and spent two years in Toronto. Now that Chapman is on a long-term deal with the Bay Area’s other MLB team, one of the stars of the Athletics’ final playoff team in Oakland will outlast the team itself in the community as the club stands poised to relocate following the 2024 campaign.
As for the Giants, the deal represents the second largest financial outlay in the club’s history and is dwarfed only by Buster Posey’s $166.5M guarantee in his early-career extension with the team. By keeping Chapman in the fold, San Francisco locks up a potential cornerstone after failing in multiple well-documented pursuits of star players in recent years, ranging from Bryce Harper and Giancarlo Stanton to more recent pursuits of Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani. While Chapman doesn’t have the star power of any of those players, he’s a reliable defender and source of power at third base who offers a solid floor of 3 WAR on an annual basis, with upside much higher than that when he’s at his best.
Of course, it’s worth noting that Chapman’s reliability could decline on both sides of the ball as he enters his mid 30’s, a particularly notable caveat given the fact that he’ll play next season at 32 years old. At the same time, the deal makes Chapman the latest long-term piece put into place by a Giants club that has seemed somewhat listless in recent years as they search for an identity and struggle to contend following the departures of Posey, Brandon Belt and Brandon Crawford.
Alongside Chapman, the club has Logan Webb and Kyle Harrison locked into the rotation, Jung Hoo Lee and Heliot Ramos in the outfield and Patrick Bailey behind the plate through at least the end of the 2028 campaign. That’s a core of talent that could compete for a playoff spot in the coming years if properly supplemented, which is a clear step in the right direction for a franchise that appears to be trending towards its third consecutive sub-.500 finish this year.
