Anthony Rendon's reported buyout talks seal it: The 2 worst contracts in MLB history came from the 2019 Nationals

For all the angst about large, nine-figure MLB contracts when they’re first signed (welcome to the club, Dylan Cease), they actually tend to be pretty good investments.

Sometimes, you get a paradigm-changing superstar who uplifts your franchise to the promised land (e.g. Shohei Ohtani, Corey Seager, Max Scherzer). Other times, you get a guy who never quite reaches the highs of his previous years, but still manages to be a legitimate MLB player for at least a few years (e.g. Xander Bogaerts, Albert Pujols).

But rare is the contract where, almost from the get-go, the player ceases to be a starter-quality MLB player, if he’s playing at all. At the very least, you should be getting a guy who can immediately be an acceptable addition to the lineup or rotation. You can count on one hand the list of big contracts who fail to meet that standard.

So it’s quite surprising when two of those contracts contain the same terms and involved players originally from the same team.

The 2019 Washington Nationals’ dilemma was doomed from the start

Wednesday saw the arrival of some news that has seemed inevitable for years. According to ESPN’s Alden Gonzalez, Anthony Rendon and the Los Angeles Angels are in talks over buying out the final year of his contract in 2026. If successful, Rendon will retire.

Rendon spent all of 2025 recovering from hip surgery and is still owed $38 million for 2026. Because he has nearly all of the leverage in the buyout talks, he will likely get most of that money in exchange for the end of an Angels career that has been a distracting fiasco.

Let’s now rewind back to the end of the 2019 MLB season. The Washington Nationals had broken through for their first World Series title, featuring an array of veterans and young stars. As they entered the offseason, they had two clear items at the top of their to-do list: re-signing Rendon and World Series MVP Stephen Strasburg.

It was a tough decision. Rendon, at the time, was one of the best third basemen in MLB and theoretically a better long-term bet despite past injury issues. He had just slashed .319/.412/.598 while leading the NL in doubles (44) and RBI (126). He had also played at least 130 games in the past four seasons.

Strasburg, meanwhile, had just posted the best season of his career and had the emotional factor of being the first overall pick who marked the beginning of the Nationals’ new era. He had been a face of the franchise since being selected in 2009 and had just led the NL with 209 innings pitched while displaying his usual post-Tommy John surgery effectiveness.

The Nationals would have liked to retain both players, but ultimately reached an agreement with only Strasburg, for seven years and $245 million. Coincidentally, those were the same terms Rendon would agree to with the Angels only two days later.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear the ideal outcome for Washington would have been signing neither of them. Because the identical deals turned out to be arguably the worst deals any MLB team has ever made from a financial perspective.

Only one other contract compares to Anthony Rendon and Stephen Strasburg’s

Let’s keep this simple. Here is Baseball Reference’s list of the 50 largest contracts in MLB history, with deals going back to 2001. It includes both free agent contracts and extensions.

At the top end is Juan Soto’s record 15-year, $765 million deal with the New York Mets. At the bottom end is David Wright’s 12-year, $165 million extension also with the Mets, though that will be bumped off once Cease’s $210 million deal is added.

Among those 50 players, Rendon ranks 42nd in Baseball Reference’s calculation of Wins Above Replacement, while Strasburg is 47th. That doesn’t sound extravagantly disastrous, but consider that two of the deals (Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Garrett Crochet) haven’t even started yet, so those ranks are actually out of 48 players. And it takes only one good season — say, Max Fried’s 2025 — to rank 40th, where Fried is now.

Then consider that of the five non-Strasburg players below Rendon, three of them signed those deals in the past two years: Willy Adames, Aaron Nola and Corbin Burnes. So it’s far too early to judge them.

That basically leaves two candidates to compare against Rendon and Strasburg as the worst ever: Miguel Cabrera’s eight-year, $240 million extension with the Detroit Tigers and Kris Bryant’s seven-year, $182 million deal with the Colorado Rockies.

At the risk of hand-waving, we can at least say Cabrera had a Silver Slugger-level year in 2016, the first year of that contract, and will go into the Hall of Fame as a Tiger. They could have spent the money more wisely, yes, but he doesn’t quite fit in with this group.

So, among the 50 largest contracts ever, we are left with Rendon, Strasburg and Bryant.

In the case of Rendon, you have a player who started off well, but only in the COVID-shortened 2020 season in which he slashed .286/.418/.497 in 52 games. Since then, well, he still has yet to play more than 60 games in a season with the club, while slashing .231/.329/.336 in 205 games from 2021 to 2025. There was a season-ending hip injury in 2021, a nearly season-ending wrist injury in 2022, a season-ending fractured tibia in 2023, a hamstring tear and oblique injury in 2024 and the hip surgery in 2025.

Strasburg was even more injury-ravaged. Following that 2019 season in which he led the NL in innings pitched, he has made seven starts total, in which he posted a 6.89 ERA. Seven, aka the amount of starts a pitcher usually makes over the course of less than two months. He experienced a nerve issue in his pitching hand in 2020, then was diagnosed with thoracic outlet syndrome (TAS) in 2021. There might not be a more dreaded issue for a pitcher than TAS, of which successful returns are few and far between. He never adequately recovered and retired after negotiating a buyout last year.

Bryant’s contract was an odd one from the start. When the Rockies signed him, he was being sold as a middle-of-the-order bat who could play five different positions. Colorado, of course, decided he should instead be a full-time left-fielder. Like Rendon and Strasburg, the first year was fine when he was on the field, with a .306/.376/.475 slash line in 2022, but back and foot issues limited him to 42 games.

Since then, Bryant has been barely playable in 128 games across three seasons and was diagnosed with a degenerative disc disease in May. If he plays a full season again, it will be a surprise. Like Rendon, there are rumors he has played his final game, though he insists he recently insisted he’s not contemplating retirement.

How do you compare these three? That’s ultimately up to you, but let’s just say Strasburg is the worst because, again, the Nationals ended up have to pay nearly that entire $245 million for seven overall bad starts. And the contract was reportedly not insured.

So Rendon and Bryant had similar arcs with good-but-limited first seasons and then a full injury breakdown, with Rendon playing 205 games in five seasons and Bryant playing 128 games in three seasons.

Now let’s consider two things. One, Rendon’s contract was $63 million more expensive overall, which ain’t nothing. Two, while Bryant has by all accounts been committed to coming back, Rendon has been blasé about his baseball future to an infamous degree. He said baseball wasn’t his top priority in 2024 and has shrugged off attempts by reporters at a status check-in. There was also that 2023 incident in which he took a swing at an opposing fan.

So Rendon has barely played since 2020, hasn’t played well at all since 2020 and has played a central role in the Angels becoming the complete laughingstock they are now. To us, that sounds like a contract worse than Bryant’s, even if the latter is worse by total WAR.

This is all admittedly harsh. None of these players have control over their health and to judge a person by the ratio of their labor to their cost is inherently dehumanizing. These were all good players at one point and all three of them have well-deserved World Series rings. They just also happen to be major reasons why so many fans get antsy when their team actually commits to spending in free agency.

So congratulations, 2019 Nationals. You will be remembered for reasons beyond a cathartic World Series title. And those reasons, barring a full reversal by Rendon and the Angels, are beyond mitigation.