Cardinals slugger Alec Burleson is enjoying the best season of his career in 2026. The 27-year-old first baseman (28 next month) is controlled by St. Louis for another two seasons but tells Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he’s “all ears” if the team wants to approach him about a contract extension. That hasn’t happened to this point, but Burleson tells Goold he’s hopeful the club will do so prior to the looming lockout this winter: “I would be 100% be open to being here and being with this group of guys.”
Burleson’s .279/.343/.464 batting line is nearly identical to the .290/.343/.459 slash he posted last season. It’s remarkable consistency, but this year’s output comes in a larger sample. He’s already taken 118 more plate appearances than he did in 2025 and still has three games left to play. Burleson is currently leading Major League Baseball with 113 runs batted in and is hopeful of adding to that total on the final weekend of the season as he looks to fend off Sal Stewart (110), Pete Alonso (110) and Pete Crow-Armstrong (107) for 2026’s top RBI total.
The 2026 season was Burleson’s first year of arbitration eligibility. He’s playing on a $3.3MM salary and ought to get a hefty raise this year after posting strong rate stats and piling up some of the top counting stats in the game. He’s due a raise this winter and one more following the 2027 season before reaching free agency in the 2028-29 offseason.
A look at MLBTR’s Contract Tracker shows there aren’t many recent comps that would be applicable to Burleson. The only first basemen in this service class who’ve signed extensions that bought out free agent years in the past half decade are Matt Olson (eight years, $168MM) and Yandy Diaz (three years, $24MM). Olson was coming off a 39-homer, five-WAR season — his second 30-homer campaign — while Diaz was entering his age-31 campaign and wouldn’t have been slated to become a free agent until his age-33 season. Olson was a more complete player, while Diaz knew an extension may have been his only chance at landing a notable multi-year deal, as teams typically aren’t keen on giving out long-term deals to players in their mid-30s.
Expanding the parameters to look at all position players who’ve signed an extension with between four and five years of service across the past five seasons shows a few more potentially relevant deals. Bryan Reynolds signed for seven years and $100MM with the Pirates in April 2023. Ryan McMahon signed for six years and $70MM in March 2022 (coming off that winter’s lockout). They’re closer in stature, but neither is a perfect comp.
Reynolds was a Super Two player who would’ve been arb-eligible four times instead of Burleson’s more typical three. He signed a two-year, $13.5MM deal covering his first two arb seasons, meaning he was negotiating from a higher starting point (salary-wise) and had some more leverage. McMahon had a lower starting point ($2.375MM in his first arb season) and a starkly different skill-set; he was also a 20-homer bat but a lesser overall hitter whose value was derived largely from elite defense at the hot corner. Burleson is a fine defensive first baseman but is clearly a bat-first player.
Burleson will probably earn somewhere in the vicinity of $15-18MM over his final two seasons of arbitration. The question for his reps at the Ballengee Group and for Cardinals brass would be one of how they value his free agent seasons. He’s not going to command an Alonso-level ($31MM) or Freddie Freeman-level ($27MM) annual value, but his 2025-26 numbers compare very favorably with what Josh Naylor did in 2025 before landing a five-year, $92.5MM free agent deal ($18.5MM AAV). If the Cards are confident that Burleson can sustain this offensive pace moving forward, something in the five-year, $75MM range would place a similar value on Burleson’s free-agent seasons.
There’s no real urgency for the Cardinals to extend Burleson, but there’s no clear first baseman of the future breathing down his neck in St. Louis, either. Ivan Herrera doesn’t have a clear position. He’d be an option at first base if the Cardinals permanently move him from behind the plate, but he’s only controlled for one season longer than Burleson and hasn’t shown as much with the bat. Young catcher Leo Bernal has played some first base, too, but manager Oli Marmol just this week told Goold that he believes Bernal has what it takes to be an everyday catcher in the majors. He might play some more first base when star catching prospect Rainiel Rodriguez is big league-ready, but the Cards will also surely be inundated with trade interest in their catching depth.
Of course, Burleson himself will draw trade interest this winter, too. There were clubs interested in him last winter and at this summer’s trade deadline. He’s down to two seasons of club control — the same juncture at which president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom traded Brendan Donovan last offseason. Outfielder Lars Nootbaar may have been traded last winter if healthy, but he was instead shipped out at the deadline with one-plus season of control left. Burleson is in this same window. The Cardinals could move him this winter, likely securing a nice package of prospects in return, sign him for the long haul or just go the arbitration route and see where they’re at next summer. The price of an extension would only increase if Burleson maintained his pace and the Cards were in contention, however.
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