Freddy Peralta Has Tried To Get New Extension With Brewers

Right-hander Freddy Peralta is in the final guaranteed year of his deal, though the Brewers have a club option to keep him around for 2026. Jon Heyman of The New York Post reports that Peralta has tried to get an extension done to keep him in Milwaukee longer but hasn’t yet been successful.

Peralta and the Brewers have already signed one extension. In February of 2020, they agreed to a five-year deal that guaranteed him $15.5MM over the 2020-24 campaigns. That bought out his remaining pre-arbitration and arbitration seasons. The club added two extra years of potential control via affordable $8MM club options for 2025 and 2026. They already triggered the first of those options.

Another extension would cost far more. At the time of the first one, Peralta wasn’t even established as a bonafide major league starter. He had 163 1/3 innings under his belt, over 22 starts and 33 relief appearances. His 30% strikeout rate was high but he had walked 11% of batters faced and was sporting a 4.79 earned run average. He was still two years away from qualifying for arbitration.

Things have certainly changed since then. Peralta has not only established himself as a starter, but he’s proven himself to be a great one. He stayed primarily in a relief role in 2020 but has been almost exclusively in the rotation since then, with just one relief appearance in both 2021 and 2022. On the whole, from 2021 to 2025, he has thrown 638 2/3 innings for the Brewers with a 3.40 ERA, 29.3% strikeout rate and 9% walk rate. He hasn’t been on the injured list since 2022. FanGraphs has credited him with 12.6 wins above replacement for that span, putting him in the top 20 of all pitchers in the majors.

He is at a point where he could rightly ask for a nine-figure deal. In the past five years, six other pitchers have hit the century mark on extensions as they neared free agency, as shown on MLBTR’s Contract Tracker. Zack Wheeler’s deal is a bit of an outlier in the group, since that was for his age 35- to -37 seasons. As for the other five, Garrett Crochet got $170MM over six years, José Berríos $131MM over seven, Tyler Glasnow $111.6MM over four, Luis Castillo $108MM over five and Joe Musgrove $100MM over five. In each case, the player was within two years of reaching free agency.

Crochet got to another level presumably because of his age, as he was slated to hit free agency just after his 27th birthday. Berríos also had youth on his side, as he was slated for free agency…