{"id":16603,"date":"2019-01-28T12:36:33","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T17:36:33","guid":{"rendered":"lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/\/?p=16603"},"modified":"2019-01-28T12:36:33","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T17:36:33","slug":"whit-merrifield-agrees-to-four-year-extension-with-royals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/2019\/01\/28\/whit-merrifield-agrees-to-four-year-extension-with-royals\/","title":{"rendered":"Whit Merrifield Agrees to Four-Year Extension with Royals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to Jeff Passan of ESPN, the Kansas City Royals and second baseman <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/players\/m\/merriwh01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&amp;utm_source=direct&amp;utm_medium=linker-\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Whit Merrifield<\/a><\/strong> have agreed upon a four-year contract extension that is said to be worth around $15 million.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">All-Star second baseman Whit Merrifield and the Kansas City Royals have a four-year deal that will land in the $15 million range, a source familiar with the deal tells ESPN. Press conference to announce it could come as soon as tomorrow. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jonmorosi?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@jonmorosi<\/a> first said it was close.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/JeffPassan\/status\/1089712128477577216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">January 28, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>As Passan notes, the deal will buy out Merrifield\u2019s final pre-arbitration year and three seasons of arbitration. He is now receiving guaranteed money after a breakout 2018 season.<\/p>\n<h4>Merrifield&#8217;s Breakout<\/h4>\n<p>The Royals are ultimately rewarding Merrifield are he enjoyed a tremendous season last year, in which he finished seventeenth in American League MVP voting.\u00a0Over 158 games, he hit an impressive .304\/.367\/.438 with 43 doubles and 12 home runs. He also led the league with 192 hits and 45 stolen bases.<\/p>\n<p>Merrifield, a 2010 ninth-round pick, spent the first seven years of his professional career in the minor leagues. He was never highly regarded as a top prospect. However, he made his big league debut in 2016 at 27-years old and took the league by storm.<\/p>\n<p>Since then, Merrifield has transformed himself into one of the premier middle infield options in the game today. Each of the three years he\u2019s been in the league he has ultimately outperformed himself. Though he had a down year in the power department last season, Merrifield brings a nice combo of speed and pop to the rather weak hitting Royals lineup.<\/p>\n<h4>A Vote of Confidence<\/h4>\n<p>Over the past couple of seasons, Kansas City has been one of the worst teams in the league. After a rather quiet offseason, they figure to be towards there bottom half of the league again.<\/p>\n<p>Even so, they have continued to\u00a0turn away all trade interest in Merrifield. They could look to trade him still, but this weekend Kansas City showed their confidence in their rising star by extending him to a longterm deal.<\/p>\n<p>Main Photo:<\/p>\n<p><a id=\"xyL6wTdJS4twlojLM_HEfw\" class=\"gie-single\" style=\"color: #a7a7a7; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal !important; border: none; display: inline-block;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/1039969196\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Embed from Getty Images<\/a><script>window.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'xyL6wTdJS4twlojLM_HEfw',sig:'EW4fpRyGULSZiRzs7lwGPBlgZLIDnsDfxQMj8w1MmO8=',w:'594px',h:'395px',items:'1039969196',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});<\/script><script src='\/\/embed-cdn.gettyimages.com\/widgets.js' charset='utf-8' async><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to Jeff Passan of ESPN, the Kansas City Royals and second baseman Whit Merrifield have agreed upon a four-year contract extension that is said to be worth around $15 million. All-Star second baseman Whit Merrifield and the Kansas City Royals have a four-year deal that will land in the $15 million range, a source [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2821,"featured_media":16604,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,12],"tags":[51,1651],"class_list":["post-16603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-royals","tag-kansas-city-royals","tag-whit-merrifield"],"modified_by":"John Flanigan","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2821"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}