If the Rays are to compete for an AL East crown this year, it’ll probably be behind another huge year from Junior Caminero. The 22-year-old cemented himself as the face of the franchise with a 45-homer season in which he hit .264/.311/.535 across 653 plate appearances. FanGraphs and Baseball Reference each valued him between four and five wins above replacement, the highest on the team.
That was Caminero’s first full season at the MLB level. He debuted at the tail end of 2023 but was optioned to Triple-A for the first few months of the ’24 season. He’s two years away from arbitration and under club control through 2030. Caminero tells Marc Topkin of The Tampa Bay Times he’d be interested in exploring a long-term extension, though it doesn’t appear the team has opened those conversations yet.
“I’d like to (discuss it), but this is not my decision,” the young star said. “I feel this is my city, Tampa. I love Tampa, but this is not my decision. I’ll control what I control — just go play, have fun.” Caminero’s agent, Rafa Nieves of Republik Sports, said last August that the team hadn’t broached an extension at the time. Nieves noted that the organization probably wasn’t in position to make the kind of commitment it would entail at the time. They were midway through an ownership sale and had seen their long-term stadium plans fall through. “Honestly, by the time they’re out of those question marks, it might be too late,” Nieves said at the time.
The Rays have completed their ownership transfer in the intervening months. The Patrick Zalupski group officially purchased the franchise in late September. The stadium situation is an ongoing question, however. The team is targeting the Hillsborough College campus as the site for a mixed-use development project that would reportedly come with an estimated $2.3 billion price.
The team hasn’t announced anything publicly, but recent reporting from The Tampa Bay Times indicated they’re hoping for public funding to cover roughly half that amount. They’re still very early in the process and have no guarantees on the public funding front, which naturally raises questions about whether they want to make a significant long-term investment.
(They also still haven’t gotten an official ruling on whether they’ll be able to void the remaining $164MM in guarantees on the Wander Franco contract. Franco is not being paid while he’s on the restricted list pending resolution of a second trial after he was convicted of sexual abuse of a minor in the Dominican Republic last June.)
Nieves suggested last summer that he could look for a guarantee in the $150-200MM range if they worked on an extension. That’d be a little above the $130-135MM area in which Jackson Merrill and Roman Anthony have landed. Caminero is a year closer to free agency than Anthony was. He put up bigger power numbers than Merrill did but was similarly valuable overall in their respective first seasons. Merrill acknowledged at the time he signed his deal that he was likely leaving some money on the table to stay in San Diego.
The track record for top position player prospects who are this productive in their early 20s is excellent. There’s a strong chance that Caminero is a franchise cornerstone. If the Rays have any reservations about valuing him at that level, it’d probably be related to his home/road splits. Caminero was dramatically more productive at their temporary home of George M. Steinbrenner Field (.313/.358/.595) than he was on the road (.218/.266/.477) last season. In all likelihood, that’s a product of an unsustainably low .197 BABIP in road games than an indication that he was a huge beneficiary of the minor league home park. The Rays are moving back to Tropicana Field for the 2026-28 seasons.
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