With opt-outs back in focus after Tatsuya Imai signing, is the Phillies’ stance prohibitive, advantageous or both?

On its face, Tatsuya Imai’s three-year, up-to-$63 million contract with the Houston Astros seemed like a deal the Phillies could’ve beat. Especially given their interest in establishing themselves in the Japanese market and finding a player to get the ball rolling. Especially given their reported interest in Imai himself.

But if you take the club at general manager Preston Mattingly’s word, one detail about Imai’s deal instantly implied that the Phillies weren’t contenders at all once push came to shove.

That detail is Imai’s two opt-outs. 

“You try and separate yourself in different ways. I think you can talk about potentially doing opt-outs,” Mattingly said on a late-December episode of “Baseball is Dead” in response to a question about pursuing free agents, particularly relievers. “That’s something the Philadelphia Phillies don’t do. So, we’re kind of upfront with that with guys.”

The Phillies’ track record backs up Mattingly’s proclamation. Jake Arrieta’s in March 2018 was the last opt-out the Phillies have given in a major-league deal; even that one was a technicality, because the Phillies could’ve voided the contract had Arrieta indeed opted out, meaning they had ultimate control. Bryce Harper is the most famous example, but along with Trea Turner, Kyle Schwarber (twice), Zack Wheeler (twice including an extension), Aaron Nola (twice including an extension), Cristopher Sánchez (extension), J.T. Realmuto, Nick Castellanos and Taijuan Walker, none of the Phillies’ myriad high-profile signings in this current window have included opt-outs.

There could be some caveats to what Mattingly said. 

One is that the rule may not be absolute. The Phillies are opportunistic above all else, and it’s easy to believe they’d make an exception if need be. 

Another is that the Phillies could well have offered opt-outs to free agents they didn’t ultimately sign. Maybe Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s offer had one. Maybe Manny Machado’s did. We’ll never quite know the details of the Phillies’ rejected offers. 

But operating under a general organizational guideline is different from communicating it to players and publicly stating it as team policy, offering up that tidbit on their own volition like Mattingly did. Whether they’d violate their own unofficial policy or not, what’s clear is that they’re strongly opposed at minimum.

The downside to that rule of thumb, especially if it’s absolute, is obvious. Imai is a prime example. 

Unless the team is making up for it with a significantly lower AAV, in which case the player could just sign elsewhere, opt-outs are almost never bad for the player. For some seeking to prove their value, the opt-out makes too much sense not to demand it. The Phillies removing themselves from opt-out consideration inherently reduces the pool of players they could lure.

For the team, the argument is the opposite: It’s almost never a good thing. 

Especially with contracts structured like Imai’s (or Alex Bregman’s with the Red Sox in 2025, or Cody Bellinger’s with the Cubs in 2024, or countless others), where the end of each year’s World Series begets an opt-out, the contract can play out in one of two ways, assuming the player acts in his financial best interest: Either the player underperforms his contract, or he’s gone. To a lesser extent, but still some extent, it’s true for contracts like Machado’s with the Padres in 2019 (opt-out after five years, which he threatened to exercise before getting an extension) or Juan Soto’s with the Mets in 2024 (opt-out after five years, though the Mets can void it should he exercise it).

An important footnote: One could certainly flip this case on its head, arguing that as disadvantageous as player options are for the club, club options are equally disadvantageous for the player, for basically the same reasons in reverse. If a team can refuse to give an opt-out, why shouldn’t a player refuse to take a club option? And that argument would be absolutely correct. Maybe a player should refuse.

The lack of an opt-out hasn’t precluded the Phillies from signing some of their top targets in recent free-agent cycles. Sure, the Phillies were the frontrunners for a lot of those aforementioned players in the first place, like Nola, Schwarber Pt. II, Realmuto and maybe even Harper. For some, though, they weren’t necessarily favorites, like Turner, Schwarber Pt. I, Wheeler Pt. 1, Castellanos and Walker.

There’s also a way to circumvent the negotiation obstacle that refusing opt-outs presents: by compensating with a higher overall price point.

There’s obvious risk in signing a player to a figure high enough above his market valuation that it convinces him to reject the flexibility. But some of the Phillies’ recent hits have afforded them a reasonable benefit of the doubt to “be bold” (borrowing an old team catchphrase) if they think they see something, with the successes of Wheeler’s original deal, Schwarber’s first deal, even Matt Strahm’s 2023 deal stacked up against a few misses like Walker and Castellanos.

Naturally, public opinion on the Phillies’ opt-out stance will swing according to the latest news. Right now, it’s easy to lambast the club for taking themselves out of the Imai sweepstakes (if that’s indeed what happened), and it’ll be easy to recycle those lines if Bregman signs another opt-out-laden deal somewhere else.

Then, someday, the Phillies will dole out another extension or free-agent contract devoid of player options, maybe compensating with extra cash that eventually proves prophetic like in Wheeler’s case, and the reaction will be like it was when the details of Harper’s contract first emerged. And so the pendulum swings.