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Luis Severino is the latest young star to sign an extension, is it because of baseball's free-agent freeze?

The Yankees and ace Luis Severino have reportedly agreed to a $40 million extension. (AP)
The Yankees and ace Luis Severino have reportedly agreed to a $40 million extension. (AP)

When spring training camps opened this week around Major League Baseball, it brought hope that maybe, finally, Bryce Harper and Manny Machado would sign with teams and baseball’s long free-agent freeze would melt away.

Nope. Not yet. Not only has that not happened, something else did happen: a number of talented young players around the league have agreed to team-friendly contract extensions.

The latest was New York Yankees ace Luis Severino, who on Friday reportedly agreed to a four-year, $40 million deal. The deal, first reported by Joel Sherman of the New York Post, would buy up Severino’s arbitration years and comes with a $15 million club option for his first year of free agency.

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By agreeing to this deal, the Yankees and Severino avoid arbitration for 2019. He’ll make $4 million this season, $10 million next, then $10.25 million in 2021 and $11 million in 2022. The club option is for 2023. In the grand scheme of society, this is a very generous contract. In baseball’s economic bubble, it’s another young player signing for below-market value relative to his skills and potential.

It’s hard to blame Severino for taking the deal, looking around at a free-agent world where Harper and Machado are still available, as are Dallas Keuchel and Craig Kimbrel. Especially since we haven’t heard even slight grumblings about teams being interested in Keuchel and Kimbrel.

Coming off a breakout season in which he went 19-8 with a 3.39 ERA, the 25-year-old Severino was given a deal that’s pretty hard to turn down: “Do you want $40 million guaranteed, yes or no?”

The other players faced with a similar question this week were Philadelphia Phillies ace Aaron Nola, who said yes to a four-year, $45 million deal Wednesday. It also avoided arbitration and bought out two of Nola’s free agency years, making it the most below-market deal of any of these.

The Minnesota Twins locked up two of their talented young players Thursday, as right fielder Max Kepler agreed to a five-year, $35 million deal with a $10 million club option for 2024. It buys out three years of free agency for Kepler, 26. Shortstop Jorge Polanco also agreed to a five-year extension, his is worth $25.75 million with two option years that could keep him in Minnesota through 2025.

In a vacuum, these types of extensions look like win-wins: The players get guaranteed money as they’re coming off good seasons. The clubs get cost-certainty to help them navigate the future — whether it’s the Yankees and Phillies trying to add big free agents this year or next, or a team like the Twins striving for contention with a homegrown core.

In a bigger sense, though, it’s hard not to look at these deals in the current state of free agency and wonder if they’re a symptom of something else. Is it the market correcting itself? Is it baseball’s economy morphing into something new? Or maybe it’s just players looking around and saying, “Well, I better get my money now.”

According to numerous reports, there’s a fear that for this generation of young players the light at the end of the tunnel — the big free-agency payday — won’t be there for them in the same way it was for so many other players.

So while it’s great that stars like Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer are publicly speaking out about the current state of free agency, they’re on the right side of it. They got their mega deals.

The younger players find themselves in a different sort of peril. It’s entirely possible that these are the biggest paydays these players ever get, which is a much different economic model that we’ve seen from baseball in the past.

Whether it’s right or wrong — and that’s certainly something that’s up for debate heading into the next collective-bargaining agreement — baseball’s economy has often been backward. Players get paid less, relative to the market, in their pre-free agency years. The best recent example is Mike Trout winning the MVP in 2014 at age 22 while making $1 million.

He got a raise to $6 million the next season, but in 2015 was still making a fraction of what people like Ryan Howard ($25M), Albert Pujols ($24M), Joe Mauer ($23M), Mark Teixeira ($22.5M) and Jose Reyes ($22M) were making.

But that overpay is a necessary part baseball’s economic ecosystem too. It’s a fact: Players get overpaid as their careers decline. It’s almost like baseball’s way of making up for underpaying players during their early years. It’s baseball’s golden parachute. What’s happening these days is fewer teams are accepting that overpay as part of the how the system works.

In the past few years, arbitration salaries have gotten higher and higher, and teams have tried harder to lock up younger stars before free agency. It’s why we’ve see players like Madison Bumgarner, Chris Archer, Chris Sale and Paul Goldschmidt become valuable trade chips for their team-friendly contract extensions.

Teams are getting smarter about where their money goes, and how to keep value in their assets. These extensions to Severino, Nola and the rest show that they’re willing to spend money, just in the way that they want.

Earlier this week, former Miami Marlins president David Samson tweeted something in response to Justin Verlander, saying the “broken system” talk was wrong. Players and their agents, Samson said, needed to adjust to a “new reality.”

He may be right about the new reality part. The monster paydays at the end of the free agency tunnel could be fading away. If Bryce Harper and Manny Machado can’t get them, who can?

The new reality could be players seizing their money. Whenever they can.

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Mike Oz is a writer at Yahoo Sports. Contact him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!

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