Josh Naylor’s $92.5M Deal Keeps Looking Like a Steal for the Mariners After Latest Reveal .MH
He’s making $18.5 million per year, but not right away.
There is only so much juice left to be squeezed from the Seattle Mariners’ signing of Josh Naylor. It’s been a fun ride, beginning with the initial reports of the deal on Sunday, continuing with the reveal of the monetary terms on Monday, and seemingly culminating with his introductory press conference on Tuesday.
Yet as they used to say: But wait, there’s more!
Even at first glance, the $92.5 million that the Mariners will pay Naylor throughout the life of his five-year deal looks like a win. His $18.5 million average salary is only the eighth-highest among first basemen, which is good value for a 28-year-old who made an impact even beyond the 128 OPS+, 20 home runs and 30 stolen bases he accumulated in 2025.
Josh Naylor’s Mariners contract looks even better after reveal of new details
What was less clear even as Naylor and the Mariners brass were carrying out a mutual love fest at T-Mobile Park on Tuesday was exactly how his contract broke down. Courtesy of Jon Heyman of the New York Post, now we know:
As tends to be the case with big-money Mariners contracts, there’s a lot going on here. But the main takeaway is that Naylor isn’t actually being paid $18.5 million per year, and that he’ll indeed make less than that in the first three years of his deal.
The signing bonus changes things, of course, as it effectively ups his pay for next season to $16.5 million if it’s coming all at once. But it doesn’t seem as if it is, as Spotrac and FanGraphs both show it being broken down into annual installments of $1.3 million. For 2026, this works out to Naylor being an $11.3 million hit against the Mariners’ payroll.
This matters in the short term, as it gives the Mariners that much more room to add salary for next season. They purportedly see their end-of-year $165 million payroll as “a starting point” for 2026, which gave them a $30-35 million budget for new salaries at the outset of the winter. To this end, $11.3 million is a much smaller bite out of that than $18.5 million.
In the long run, the blow from Naylor’s jump in salary from 2026 to 2027 isn’t actually going to land that hard. That $6 million step up is half of the $12 million that will come off the books when J.P. Crawford’s contract expires at the end of next season. His spot at shortstop is likely to be filled by Colt Emerson, who currently ranks as MLB Pipeline’s No. 9 overall prospect. He’ll only be entitled to the league minimum for at least the first two years of his major league career.
In giving the Mariners credit for their clever accounting, we’re not trying to imply that Naylor got screwed. Even he used the word “fair” multiple times in expressing his feelings about his contract on Tuesday, and it’s not as if the math will somehow deny him his full guarantee of $92.5 million.
What we have here, then, is a contract that is the best of all possible words. It’s a good deal for Naylor, and it’s structured in such a way to help the Mariners build a winning team around a guy who they rightfully believe is a winner.
