Diamondbacks, Geraldo Perdomo in Agreement on Contract Extension

Perdomo is now signed through 2029, and set to make $45 million after this season

I think it relatively safe to say none of us expected this piece of breaking news this evening, but Jeff Passan dropped this Passan bomb:

Per Nick Piecoro, Perdomo will earn $5 million in 2026 with a consistent increase to $13 million in 2029, and has a $15 million option with a $3 million buyout.

There are two ways of looking at this, and they were summarized in what were the first two responses to Passan’s tweet as of this writing. @blake_levine stated “Don’t like this. Feel like they could put this money towards more pitching” and @JaguarGator9NFL said “That’s it? Only $11M a year[?] I’ll gladly take that. Love Perdomo.” I suspect that there will be a similar divide here, if for different reasons. After all, pitching is currently pretty low on the list of needs, although with Zac Gallen likely departing after this season, it may well become a need before Perdomo receives the first check from this extension.

Perdomo is almost a Rorschach Test kind of player, in that opinions of Perdomo tell more about the person stating the opinion than they do about the player himself. He provides tougher at bats than any player on the team. He doesn’t swing at bad pitches (chase rate in the 96th percentile last season) and makes contact when he swings (whiff rate in the 98th percentile.) He makes good contact for his swing type; in 2023 his squared up percentage was in the 95th percentile and, while he did not qualify for that leaderboard in 2024, his 33.6% squared up rate was higher than any player who did. On the other hand, his bat speed is quite low; 1st percentile in 2023 and only slightly higher in 2024, although he did not qualify for the leaderboard. This translated to a hard hit rate in the 5th percentile and an average exit velocity in the 14th percentile. Many of those numbers are reminiscent of Luis Arraez.

But there is one significant difference between Arraez and Perdomo: Perdomo draws walks and doesn’t chase, while Arraez practically never saw a pitch he wouldn’t swing at. That works for Arraez, because he can make contact with practically any pitch, but it also severely limits his value. Thus, while Perdomo likely won’t win any batting titles, he posted an OBP almost identical to Arraez last year, and with the defense, he was worth anywhere from around twice what Arraez was to 3.5 times what Arraez was according to bWAR.

Were this the 1980s, Perdomo would be a prototypical shortstop, and possibly one of the best in the league. (Seriously. Just ten shortstops were above-average offensively in the 1980s, and that includes Robin Yount and Julio Franco. While Yount was a regular shortstop through 1984, he never played there again after that season, and Franco split time between the middle infield spots.) But it is not the 1980s, and these days, fans expect power. And Perdomo lacks that. He has 14 home runs in his career; Alex Rodriguez hit 14 in a month. So there will be plenty of naysayers.

This also raises the question of where Perdomo and Jordan Lawlar will play, given that Lawlar has been the heir apparent at shortstop since he was drafted in 2021. But thanks to the universal DH, there are plenty of at-bats to go around, and we might well see Ketel Marte moved to the DH role, or one of Perdomo or Lawlar moved to third base.

It would be remiss to conclude this without mentioning that Perdomo was an All Star in 2023. He was even better in 2024. Clearly, Mike Hazen and the front office think he is on the right track to be even better going forward, or at least reprise his 2024.

On the whole, Perdomo should have no difficulty earning his salary, as it would only take somewhere around 5-6 WAR over the course of the deal. This is a solid, if not splashy, extension.