No, Reynolds can hit free agency in his age 31 season, so there's definitely a world where he waits it out and tries to seriously cash in. The question is probably how interested he is in guaranteeing himself a certain amount of money no matter what.
2021 may well be a career year for Reynolds, it's hard to say. If he comes close to repeating it and then does that again, he's probably looking at an enormous payday when he hits free agency, especially if he's a CF. I think he's a good enough defender, I'm not sure it's ironclad. There's a potentially narrow line to walk if he's more like rookie Bryan Reynolds and a ~3 WAR player in a corner, without overwhelming power. I'm not sure he's a perfect comparison in every way, but look at Michael Brantley for instance.
My suspicion is that we have no meaningful interest in even signing him to a contact like
@Empoleon8771 pitched, or something a bit higher like 110M or so. Right now, from Reynolds perspective, there are reasons why signing a deal that could sacrifice a pretty big chunk of money would still be appealing. It's a time bomb question, really -- it's possible that he could follow a similar path as a guy like Springer (though I would also wager his World Series MVP helped him out), but that involves no certainty and lots of year-to-year navigations, etc... could be traded at any moment, could have a major injury and fail to put up the numbers again which would seriously curtail earnings.
At the end of the day it involves a lot of speculation, but we don't really know the specifics. We know that like Hayes, he was probably seriously lowballed in earlier offers, but I think up until Hayes' contract came out, people would have been skeptical that Hayes would sign for that length and price. Reynolds is different because he's proven more, and a 2022 campaign might cement that, but team control still weighs extraordinarily heavily in this situation.
I think for my part, if it came out that we were kicking around a number like 6-7 years, 90-140M, I'd count that as a pretty serious attempt and if Reynolds wanted to turn it down for the chance to get 40-60+M more when he's all said and done, more power to him. For now we just have some vague thing about Nutting not wanting to see arbitration happen, so a compromise two-year deal might be what happens (Mackey seems to think so), but at least take a serious run at him.
It would have been nice to do both together in the same front-loaded style, but regardless the team is not in a bad situation if it has Hayes where it does and can have Reynolds at 20-25M AAV max in his highest years. That's maybe 35M on top of the order guys playing important positions -- you surround it with a good farm system and smart supplementary free agent signings, and you still aren't pushing 90-100M probably. It's plenty affordable, and if we decided to go another direction, then we should still have the money to take a serious run at the top guys on the market in way similar to Minnesota and Correa (I'm serious, as obviously unlikely as it would ever be to materialize).
