Sources: Alex Bregman lands free agent deal with Red Sox
Free agent Alex Bregman has a new home after agreeing to a three-year, $120 million deal with the Boston Red Sox on Wednesday night, sources told ESPN’s Jesse Rogers.
The $40 million annual salary is $10 million-plus more per year than other teams were offering, sources said. The deal includes two opt-outs and deferred money.
Bregman, who was the biggest free agent remaining on the market, is expected to play second base for Boston, sources said, after primarily playing third for the Houston Astros since 2020. He gives the Red Sox another big bat to go with a retooled pitching staff after the team acquired Garrett Crochet via trade and signed Walker Buehler and Aroldis Chapman via free agency earlier this offseason.
Boston manager Alex Cora wanted Bregman badly, having previously coached him in Houston. And with the contract, the Red Sox made a big-money splash after guaranteeing only $52.3 million to free agents this winter, leading to significant frustration from a fan base of a team that hasn’t been to the postseason since 2021.
Bregman, who previously played all nine seasons with the Astros, had received interest from several teams, with the Detroit Tigers, Toronto Blue Jays and Chicago Cubs most heavily linked to him, along with Boston and Houston. The Tigers offered him a six-year, $171 million deal, and the Astros were around six years, $156 million, sources said.
Bregman’s right-handed bat has a track record of success at Fenway Park. In 21 career games there, he has a .375 batting average with seven home runs and 15 RBIs. His career 1.240 OPS at Fenway is the best in major league history among players with at least 90 plate appearances.
After slumping mightily at the start of the 2024 season, Bregman’s bat began to come around in June and the rest of the team followed, as the Astros ultimately jumped the Seattle Mariners to claim their seventh AL West title in eight years.
Bregman, who will turn 31 on March 30, finished the season with a .260 batting average, 26 home runs and 75 RBIs in 145 games. Houston lost back-to-back AL Wild Card Series games to the Tigers.
The two-time All-Star had surgery after the season to remove a bone chip from his right elbow, and agent Scott Boras said Bregman, who has exclusively played third base since 2020, was willing to move to second base if needed.
The Red Sox already have star Rafael Devers at third, so Bregman’s expected move to second would allow him to stay there. And while Bregman has logged only 32 innings at second in his major league career, Cora referred to him last month as someone he envisioned as “a Gold Glove second baseman” when the two were together in Houston.
Bregman, who is coming off a five-year, $100 million contract, slashed .275/.376/.488 with 157 home runs and 554 RBIs from 2017 to 2023, compiling 34.2 FanGraphs wins above replacement, eighth most among all position players. Overall, he has a .272 career batting average with 191 home runs and 663 RBIs.
He rejected a one-year, $21.05 million qualifying offer by the Astros on Nov. 19, meaning Houston will receive a compensatory pick after the fourth round of this year’s MLB draft. Boston will lose its second-highest pick for signing him and will forfeit $500,000 of international signing bonus pool allocation.
Bregman’s ascension directly correlates with the Astros’ run of dominance, as his first full season came in 2017, when the franchise won its first championship — a title later tainted by the sign-stealing scandal that led to the firing of general manager Jeff Luhnow and field manager A.J. Hinch.
The Astros went on to make seven consecutive appearances in the AL Championship Series and won another World Series, during which Bregman established himself as one of the game’s best third basemen and became, along with Jose Altuve, one of the team’s core leaders.
Bregman was originally drafted by the Red Sox out of high school in 2012, but he opted to go to college at LSU. Houston then selected him second overall in the 2015 draft.
The Red Sox will hold their first full-squad workout Monday in Fort Myers, Florida. They host the Astros in the regular season Aug. 1-3, then visit Houston Aug. 11-13.
News of Bregman’s deal with Boston was first reported by The Athletic.
Information from ESPN’s Jeff Passan, Buster Olney and Alden Gonzalez was used in this report.
Tigers Today podcast: Alex Bregman says no to Detroit; our instant reaction
Tony Paul reacts to Alex Bregman saying no to the Tigers late Wednesday night and yes to the Red Sox, signing a $120 million, three-year contract with Boston.
Here are highlights from the latest episode of The News’ Tigers Today podcast:
▶ :30: Red Sox win Alex Bregman Sweepstakes
▶ 2:20: Bregman has opt-out clause after first and second season
▶ 4:40: Bregman era officially over in Houston
▶ 6:10: Tigers offered six years, $171.5 million with opt-out clause in 2026
▶ 9:20: Upgraded at 1B with Colt Keith and 2B with Gleyber Torres
▶ 11:50: Matt Vierling, Jace Jung to share third-base duties for now
▶ 13:20: Tigers made “legitimate offer”
▶ 15:20: Bregman would’ve been “excellent clubhouse presence” with Tigers
▶ 17:40: Chris Ilitch made “aggressive and best pitch”
▶ 19:40: Tigers still top contender with Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal
▶ 21:40: Scott Harris makes “shrewd additions”
▶ 24:20: Chris McCosky’s coverage from Lakeland
Red Sox To Sign Alex Bregman To Three-Year Deal
MLB Trade Rumors
By Anthony Franco | February 12, 2025 at 11:59pm CDT
The Red Sox are reportedly in agreement with Alex Bregman on a three-year, $120MM deal. The Boras Corporation client receives massive $40MM salaries in each season, though an unreported amount of that money is deferred. Bregman can opt out after each of the first two seasons. The team has yet to officially announce the signing.
Boston gets the best remaining free agent by offering a massive annual sum. Bregman reportedly had a standing six-year offer valued at $156MM from the Astros for most of the offseason. The Tigers reportedly put forth a six-year, $171.5MM proposal, while the Cubs offered a $120MM guarantee over a four-year term. As of last month, Bregman remained committed to a long-term deal. The Sox’s willingness to offer one of the biggest AAVs in league history changed the calculus.
It marks the end of an illustrious tenure in Houston. The second overall pick in the 2015 draft, Bregman was in the majors within a year of coming out of LSU. He immediately locked down third base. He hit .284/.352/.475 over his first full big league campaign, helping the Astros to their first World Series title in 2017. He was one of the top handful of players in baseball over the next two seasons. Bregman secured consecutive top five finishes in AL MVP balloting while combining for a .291/.409/.561 slash with more walks than strikeouts between 2018-19.
Bregman, 31 in March, successively hit 31 and 41 home runs over that stretch. His power production has ticked down since the ’19 campaign, which was the most homer-heavy season in league history. Bregman has hit between 23 and 26 homers in each of the past three seasons. He’d continued to post excellent on-base numbers up through 2023, though his OBP dropped last year as his walks plummeted.
The two-time All-Star hit .260/.315/.453 across 634 trips to the plate in 2024. He had by far his lowest on-base percentage since his half-season as a rookie nearly a decade ago. That was almost entirely because of a drop in free passes. Bregman walked in 6.9% of his plate appearances, nearly halving his typical 12-13% rates. He remained incredibly difficult to punch out (13.6% strikeout rate) and narrowly established a new career high with a 40.1% hard contact percentage.
Bregman started the season very slowly. He hit .216/.283/.294 with only one home run through the end of April. While his power started to rebound in May, he reached base at a meager .276 clip that month. He entered June with a .219/.280/.372 slash line that was beginning to raise questions about his earning power. He put those to rest with a fantastic finish to the season. Bregman hit .284/.337/.500 with 20 doubles and 19 home runs across his final 398 plate appearances. While the walks remained down, he managed much better batted ball results in the second half.
Over eight-plus seasons with the Astros, Bregman hit .272/.366/.483 with 191 home runs. FanGraphs and Baseball Reference each valued his Houston tenure around 40 wins above replacement. He won a Silver Slugger and was MVP runner-up in 2019 and won his first career Gold Glove last season. He has been an instrumental piece of Houston’s sustained postseason success and World Series wins in 2017 and ’23. His swing is perfectly suited for the short left field at Houston’s home park. Bregman certainly hasn’t been a product of the Crawford Boxes, though. He has been essentially the same hitter on the road (.275/.362/.489) and at home (.270/.369/.476).
Bregman will have a similar home setup with the Green Monster at Fenway. He’ll reunite with Sox manager Alex Cora, who was Houston’s bench coach in 2017. While the Sox’s front office had trepidation about adding another long-term infield commitment alongside Rafael Devers and Trevor Story, they were willing to pay handsomely in the short term.
Boston had roughly $210MM in luxury tax commitments going into this evening, as calculated by RosterResource. A $40MM average annual value for Bregman would push that close to $250MM. The actual AAV won’t be quite so high, as the deferrals will drop the net present value to an extent. It’s likely that the Sox will still end up beyond the $241MM luxury tax threshold. They didn’t pay the CBT last season, so they’d only owe a 20% tax on spending between $241MM and $261MM. Even a true $40MM AAV for Bregman would only come with a $1.8MM tax hit for the Sox.
It’s the culmination of an exciting offseason for chief baseball officer Craig Breslow and his staff. The Sox opened the winter looking to add upside in their rotation. They eschewed long-term pitching investments, instead acquiring Garrett Crochet for four prospects while bringing in Walker Buehler on a one-year, $21.05MM deal. Boston signed Patrick Sandoval to a two-year contract midway through his rehab from Tommy John surgery and made a pair of one-year pickups in the bullpen (Aroldis Chapman, Justin Wilson).
Adding a right-handed bat was the one offseason goal that the Sox had not accomplished. While an outfielder may have been a cleaner roster fit, Bregman’s willingness to move off his longtime position makes this workable. The Sox intend to play him at second base, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan. That made him a better fit than Nolan Arenado, who has been connected to the Sox in trade rumors for much of the winter.
Devers has been vocal about preferring to stick at third base. Bregman is a superior defender at the hot corner, but he should be athletic enough to move to the keystone for at least one season. He’d likely have spent most of his career in the middle infield had he not broken in with a team that had a Jose Altuve/Carlos Correa pairing.
That blocks the path to playing time for top prospect Kristian Campbell in the short term. The 22-year-old had a monster minor league season (.330/.439/.558 between three levels) to put himself in consideration for the second base job. Campbell seems likelier to begin the year in Triple-A Worcester now. He has played both middle infield positions and all three outfield spots in the minors, though, so the Sox should be able to find playing time for him somewhere as injuries arise throughout the year.
Campbell’s presence is probably a big reason the Red Sox kept this to a short-term commitment. Julian McWilliams of the Boston Globe reports that Boston wasn’t interested in going past three guaranteed years. The tradeoff involves one of the largest per-year commitments in MLB history. The pre-deferral $40MM AAV is tied for the sixth-largest ever. It’s the second-biggest of this winter behind Juan Soto’s $51MM AAV and ties the Aaron Judge deal for third in history among position players (trailing Shohei Ohtani and Soto).
Bregman was the final unsigned free agent who had declined a qualifying offer. Boston surrenders their second-round pick (54th overall) in the upcoming draft, as well as $500K from their international signing bonus pool in 2026. They’re getting a compensatory pick about 20 spots later with Nick Pivetta signing with San Diego, so the draft capital comes out relatively close to a wash. As luxury tax payors, the Astros get the lowest compensation pick for Bregman’s departure — a selection after the fourth round, which lands around 137th overall.
Chandler Rome of The Athletic first reported that Bregman was signing with the Red Sox on a three-year, $120MM deal. Jon Heyman of The New York Post had the presence of deferrals. Ari Alexander of Houston’s KPRC-2 had the even salary structure. Image courtesy of Imagn.
BOSTON RED SOX HOUSTON ASTROS NEWSSTAND TRANSACTIONS
ALEX BREGMAN
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