Vlad decisions: The cost of waiting this long to sign Guerrero Jr.

The baseball world believes it's unlikely Vladimir Guerrero Jr. forgoes free agency next winter by signing an extension with the Toronto Blue Jays.

Although Toronto still hopes to sign its star first baseman, as The Athletic's Ken Rosenthal reported this week, it seems unlikely the parties will find common ground with Guerrero so close to the open market. He'll be the most sought-after free agent after next season and only 26 years old.

Guerrero reportedly already rejected a $340-million extension earlier this winter, and his price tag only increased after Juan Soto signed a record $765-million deal earlier this month.

Not helping Toronto's negotiating position is the fact everyone knows the club made lucrative offers to Soto and Shohei Ohtani over the last two offseasons.

With Soto's deal resetting the market for young free agents, the Jays and ownership (Rogers Communications) may have to spend half a billion dollars to keep Guerrero long term.

It leaves team management with a difficult set of choices: pony up the big bucks, face the loss of its franchise cornerstone after this season, or trade him during the year if Toronto falls out of contention.

The lesson in Guerrero's case is the cost of waiting.

Yes, there's a cost to a club if it makes a big bet on a young player in the early years of his career before he establishes a track record.

But there's also the price of indecision. The closer a young star inches toward free agency, the more expensive his contract extension demands become. The decision to wait may also leave the player feeling he's not valued enough to remain.

The Blue Jays should have made an offer to Guerrero much earlier in his career that he would have had difficulty refusing.

However, to be fair to the club, rival front-office officials tell theScore it's become more difficult to lock up young players to extensions. Moreover, Guerrero didn't always make it easy to want to bet on him.

After his breakout 2021 campaign that saw him finish second in MVP voting behind Ohtani - a season fueled in part by playing in hitter-friendly, temporary home ballparks in Dunedin and Buffalo - he followed with two consecutive years of decline.

He batted only .264 with a 118 wRC+ in 2023. There were questions about how he'd age, especially before he dedicated himself to a new training regimen last winter.

And with a defensive profile likely limiting him to first base or DH, he'd have to hit - really hit - to justify a contract well into nine figures.

One can understand how ownership might have balked at the prospect of a lengthy deal following two years of decline. But teams must take risks and accept uncertainty at some point to pursue upside for their club.

If the Blue Jays weren't going buy low (or lower) on Guerrero at an earlier and more uncertain point in his career, who would they bet on?

Remember, he was an incredibly rare prospect who received top-scale 80 grades for his hit and power tools from Baseball America, making him their No. 1 overall prospect. Those skill assessments were backed up by tremendous minor-league production. The bloodlines are also pristine, as his father's a Hall of Famer. Toronto made a huge push to sign him in 2015 as a 16-year-old international free agent.

The cost of waiting also hurts Guerrero's value to the team as a trade chip because of the dwindling amount of club control left. Should the Jays fall out of contention by next year's trade deadline, Guerrero on a long-term extension may have had a lot of trade value should the team enter a rebuilding period, which is a very real possibility.

Teams must act early with star talent. The Angels signed Mike Trout to a six-year, $144-million deal in 2014 after his second year in the majors, buying out two years of his free agency. Bobby Witt Jr. signed an 11-year, $288-million deal prior to his 2024 breakout season with Kansas City.

Witt's an interesting comparison. While Trout performed magnificently in his first two full seasons, there were still some holes in Witt's game entering last year, namely a below-average on-base percentage.

The Royals bet that the best prospect to come through their system in years was going to keep improving. And it's a bet that immediately paid off as Witt blossomed into an MVP-level performer and led them to a wild-card berth. Imagine Witt Jr. hitting the open market after 2027 had he not signed his extension. He might have exceeded Soto's contract guarantee.

One can make the case the Blue Jays should have forced the issue with Guerrero earlier, perhaps before he even made a major-league plate appearance.

There have been 14 pre-arbitration extensions awarded to players with fewer than 100 days of service time in MLB history, according to MLB.com's Matt Kelly. Seven such deals were given to players with zero days in the big leagues.

These deals aren't without risk. Evan White (Mariners), Scott Kingery (Phillies), and Jon Singleton (Astros) all signed lucrative deals that locked them up for at least five years before taking an MLB at-bat. Those deals didn't pan out for the respective clubs.

But Guerrero was a much better prospect than any of those guys.

His pedigree was more like that of Jackson Chourio, who the Brewers locked up for eight years and $80 million guaranteed before he took a big-league rep. It looks like a great bet. Guerrero's potential was more like Corbin Carroll with the Diamondbacks, and Evan Longoria with the Rays, star prospects who signed extensions before accruing a year of service time.

Risk is mitigated by signing players in their early to mid-20s when history says they'll continue to improve. A Guerrero today signed through, say, 2027 would at least have extended the Jays' window and enhanced his trade value.

In these cases, the risk-reward balance is asymmetric. There's more upside to signing a younger player than there is possible downside. Even if the bet doesn't work out, it's at a much lower cost than having to make those risk calculations now.

The downside with Guerrero was that he'd only be a somewhat above-average hitter, outside of severe injury. Even those decline years in 2022 and 2023 produced OPS+ marks of 133 and 116. He's likely to be much better than that.

We don't know for sure what Blue Jays ownership was willing to offer over those early years, or what Guerrero would have accepted. What we do know: the cost of waiting is expensive. It'll cost the Jays either a massive guarantee or the loss of the franchise's face.

Travis Sawchik is theScore's senior baseball writer.