Outfielder Cody Bellinger and the Cubs agreed on a three-year, $80 million deal on Sunday, according to a report from ESPN’s Jeff Passan. Bellinger will reportedly receive opt-outs after each of the first two years of the deal. The deal has not been confirmed by the club.

Last offseason, the question surrounding Bellinger was: Which team will take a chance on the former NL MVP who saw his offensive production fall off a cliff from 2020-22? This time around, it wasn’t a question of whether Bellinger was worth taking a flier on, but just how much he’d earn with his next contract.

Following his 2019 NL MVP campaign, Bellinger hit just .203/.272/.376 over the next three seasons with the Dodgers. But upon joining the Cubs on a one-year deal for 2023, he regained much of the pop at the plate that led to his rapid rise to stardom. In 130 games with Chicago, he hit .307/.356/.525 with 26 home runs, 97 RBIs and 20 steals.

Although he’s already played in seven Major League seasons, Bellinger is still in his prime at 28 years old. He made his big league debut for the Dodgers at age 21 in 2017, a season in which he was named the NL Rookie of the Year. He had a tremendous campaign at the plate, belting 39 homers and posting a .933 OPS.

Bellinger took a bit of a step back offensively in his sophomore season, though he still finished the 2018 campaign with 25 homers and an .813 OPS. Then came his MVP performance in ’19, in which he smashed 47 homers while producing a .305/.406/.629 slash line and winning a Gold Glove Award for his stellar play in right field.

The underlying quality of contact metrics suggest that Bellinger had some luck on his side during a resurgent 2023 — according to Statcast, his expected batting average was 37 points below the actual figure, his expected slugging percentage was 88 points lower than his actual slugging percentage and both his hard-hit rate and barrel rate were down significantly over the previous year.

Still, Bellinger’s 15.6 percent strikeout rate was the lowest of his career and represented a 43 percent drop from his K rate in 2022. And the rate at which he made contact on the “sweet spot” in ’23 was 38 percent, the second-highest of his career only behind his 39.6 percent sweet-spot rate from his ’19 MVP campaign.