Jim Bowden — former GM and The Athletic analyst — put a number on the table: 6 years and $128 million for Jazz Chisholm Jr., with an opt-out after Year 2. The projection sparked immediate debate, and for good reason. Chisholm is heading into free agency after a 2026 season in which he hit .231 with a .711 OPS and was benched during the ALDS sweep Tampa Bay put on the Yankees.
What Bowden Sees — and What the Data Says
Bowden’s number isn’t crazy if you’re thinking about peak Chisholm. In 2025, he hit .242/.332/.481 with 31 home runs, 31 stolen bases, a 4.2 WAR (FanGraphs) and a Silver Slugger. That version of Chisholm is worth around $20M a year, no argument.
The problem is that 2026 was not 2025. Chisholm finished the season with an OPS+ of 97 — 3% below league average — and a 1.7 WAR per Baseball Reference. His xwOBA of .294 sits at the 16th percentile in MLB: Statcast is saying the quality of contact simply isn’t there. And to cap it off, he hit .182 with zero home runs in four postseason games before being pulled from the lineup.
The rest of the market isn’t buying Bowden’s number:
- NBC Sports projects 3 years and $81 million.
- An anonymous executive cited by MLB.com sees 3 to 4 years at roughly $20M per year.
The gap between those estimates and Bowden’s isn’t a rounding difference — it’s $47M to $66M. That’s a fundamental disagreement about whether Chisholm is a star who had a bad year or a player who just showed his real ceiling.
Why the 2026–27 Market Complicates Everything
There’s one force pushing Chisholm’s price up regardless of what he did on the field: this free-agent class is widely considered one of the weakest in years. Pitchers lead the headliners — Tarik Skubal, Freddy Peralta — and the position-player market is thin. Chisholm ranks 9th overall on NBC Sports’ free-agent board, which in a scarce market tends to inflate offers beyond what cold numbers would justify.
Bowden points to the Padres, Angels and Athletics as the most likely landing spots. The Yankees, meanwhile, appear set to not extend a qualifying offer — valued at roughly $23.1M — which opens his market to more teams without costing them a draft pick. That’s a real negotiating lever, even if his 2026 numbers don’t earn it on their own.
Worth remembering: before last season, Chisholm himself was reportedly seeking 8 to 10 years at $35M annually — close to $350 million total. He ended up signing a one-year, $10.2M arbitration deal. Whatever the market ultimately offers will land well below his original expectations — and very likely below Bowden’s projection too.
The Numbers Behind the Debate
Here’s what Statcast logged for Chisholm across his 532 plate appearances in 2026:
- AVG: .231 | OPS: .711 | OPS+: 97
- 19 home runs, 55 RBI
- xwOBA: .294 — 16th percentile
- Exit velocity: 90.4 mph avg
- Barrel rate: 8.2%
- Hard-hit rate: 42.8%
- Bat speed: 72.9 mph avg
- Whiff rate: 13th percentile (among the worst in MLB)
- Sprint speed: 75th percentile
The legs are still there. The bat? That’s the question the entire market is trying to price right now.
