When Brayan Bello returns to the Dominican Republic for this weekend’s series against the Tampa Bay Rays, he’ll step onto his native soil with a big new contract extension in hand that should provide financial security for the rest of his life.
Bello will no doubt receive a hero’s welcome.
The Red Sox announced Bello’s new deal Thursday evening and on Saturday he will be officially re-introduced during a press conference at Estadio Quisqueya Juan Marichal in Santo Domingo. Though Bello is not scheduled to pitch this weekend, he will be front and center as the club highlights the decades-long connection between the Red Sox and the Caribbean nation.
Pedro Martinez. Manny Ramirez. David Ortiz. Rafael Devers. Now the Red Sox are betting $55 million that Bello can be the next in line to carry on that tradition.
Not bad for a kid from Samaná who signed for just $28,000 as a teenager.
Following an offseason that’s otherwise fallen short by every conceivable metric, Bello’s extension is a huge breakthrough that lends credence to the club’s oft-stated goal of building towards sustainable success. In Bello the Red Sox finally have a homegrown arm who can anchor their starting rotation, and a deal like this is about as big a win-win as you’ll find in baseball.
Bello is now assured life-changing money and job security through the remainder of this decade, and the Red Sox lock in a potential front-of-the-rotation standout on team-friendly terms for the next six years.
Still, a deal like this isn’t without some measure of risk.
The risk for the Red Sox is Bello gets injured or flat out flops, becoming an increasingly expensive albatross over the course of the deal. The risk for Bello is that if he becomes a perennial Cy Young contender he could become grossly underpaid by the end of the deal, and by taking more money up front he may wind up leaving tens of millions on the table over the long haul.
If that happens and the Red Sox pick up his $21 million club option for 2030, he’d wind up having to wait an extra two years from when he would have originally hit free agency to realize his full value.
Those factors are real and they’re the reason you don’t see pre-arbitration extensions like this more often, but in this case the potential rewards more than justify the risk.
While Bello’s career record of 14-19 with a 4.37 ERA over 41 appearances doesn’t jump off the page, he’s provided plenty of indications that the best is yet to come. As a rookie in 2022 he overcame a rocky start and finished the season with an excellent six-start stretch in September, and last year he was the club’s best starting pitcher by a comfortable margin, leading the team with 157 innings while posting a 3.26 ERA over 20 starts from May through August.
He’s also regularly come through under the bright lights — dominating the New York Yankees back-to-back weekends on Sunday Night Baseball — and after he was optioned to Triple-A as part of the club’s early-season rotation shuffle, he took it personally and made sure a similar move would never be put on the table again.
It doesn’t hurt that he’s drawn rave reviews from no less than Pedro Martinez, who’d know a stud when he sees one.
After offseason with Pedro, a confident Bello brings upgraded slider to spring training
All of that and more is why the Red Sox felt comfortable making such a big bet on Bello's future, and now it'll be on the young right-hander to live up to his end of the bargain. The good news is even with this payday Bello has every incentive to chase greatness, and if at the end of his contract he's fulfilled his potential and emerged as a bona fide ace, he'll still have a chance to become a free agent at age 31. The money will work itself out.
But that's a matter for another day. What's important today is Bello's sticking around for the long haul, and this weekend's celebration in Santo Domingo will mark both a happy homecoming and the start of a new phase of his Red Sox journey.
Since he first signed with Boston seven years ago Bello has grown from a Red Sox prospect into a Red Sox mainstay. Now if all goes well, whenever Bello returns home in another seven years he could have another new title: "Red Sox legend."
