Yesterday, we broke down the payrolls in the American League. This post repeats that exercise for the National League. The average Major League Baseball payroll in 2015 is roughly $122 million. With top-heavy payrolls, the median comes in lower at around $112 million. In 2014, the average payroll in the AL East on Opening Day was $135.1 million, narrowly edging the NL West’s $135 million. With sizable increases for both the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants, the NL West is now the highest-salaried division in the majors.

Figures from Cots with minimum salaries added to create a 25-man roster.

The NL West has a healthy monetary advantage over the NL East and the NL Central due principally to the Dodgers and Giants. Eleven of 15 NL teams have payrolls below the MLB average. Only the Dodgers, Giants, Washington Nationals, and Philadelphia Phillies have payrolls above $120 million.
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Ben and Sam preview the Pirates’ season with Sarah Sprague, and Sahadev talks to Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Pirates beat writer Travis Sawchik (at 23:22).

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Doug Melvin, a few days ago:

Melvin wouldn’t comment on the state of possible talks with the Phillies, but acknowledged the lines of communication have remained open with “K-Rod.”

“I don’t know if it’s active, but we still have conversations,” Melvin said. “Mark deals more with that. (Agent) Scott (Boras) keeps calling Mark.”

You know how this goes. Sometimes, Boras has problems finding the right level of demand among 30 baseball front offices. But he’s skilled enough to know that he’s always got more options, as, above 30 baseball front offices, are 30 baseball owners or ownership groups. Said executives are easier to persuade, as they’re in charge of the money, and they tend to know a little less about roster management. So, long story short, Boras has gotten the Brewers to make another commitment to Francisco Rodriguez, this one for at least two years and $13 million. It happened above the general manager’s head, but it’s not a nightmare; Rodriguez remains a useful pitcher, and the Brewers remain on the positive side of the be-a-seller threshold. This is an example of ownership caving, but it’s not a godawful fit.

As is often the case, what I find interesting here is less about the contract, and more about the player. The contract is fine. Maybe a little heavy, I don’t know. But Rodriguez himself has had a particularly fascinating career. So this is a good opportunity to call attention to the transition he’s largely been able to pull off. Rodriguez is still just 33 years old, yet he debuted when he was 20, and his career has had two distinct stages. Rodriguez, at least as a player, has evolved.

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Just over four years ago now, I wrote a post for this site called Dollar Sign on the Scout. A nod, that title, to an excellent work of non-fiction by Kevin Kerrane. The basic goal of the post was to identify those scouts who had created the most surplus value for their respective clubs — which is to say, had signed the players who produced wins above and beyond the sort their respective signing-bonus dollar figures would typically fetch on the open market. For the purposes of that study, I used Victor Wang’s then mostly current work on prospect valuations (updated multiple times in the interim). I also used the signing-scout data made available for each prospect by Baseball America in their annual handbook documenting such players.

By this methodology, the top scout over the five-year period between 2006 and -10 was Detroit’s Bill Buck, who was given credit for signing Cameron Maybin, Rick Porcello, and Justin Verlander — which triumvirate received nearly $10 million in bonuses, but whose rankings among Baseball America’s top-100 prospects at various points suggested they’d produce over $70 million more than that for the club in terms of overall value.

The thing about Porcello and Maybin and Verlander, though, is that they were all drafted in the first round, and first-round signings are typically the result not merely of a single, unkempt bird-dog following his intuition down a dusty, rural two-track, but rather of a decision made by a collection of front-office employees — including crosscheckers, a scouting director, and the general manager. As such, it doesn’t entirely make sense to credit an area scout with the signing of first-round draftee.

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We recently took a look at payroll by team as well as changes since the start of 2014. Interleague play, the advent of the Wild Card, and the addition of the second wild card has broadened the scope of competition in baseball. Multiple playoff spots in each league are fought for outside of the divisional format causing competition between teams in different divisions. However, the second wild card also increased the emphasis of winning the division and trying to avoid a 50/50 play-in game before making the divisional round. The current schedule format also increases the importance of the division with an unbalanced schedule. Teams play games within the division in close to 50% of their games.

The divisions are not on the same footing financially with the American League East outspending the rest of the divisions. The average payroll by division are below. The black line represents the Major League Baseball average of roughly $122 million.

Figures from Cots with minimum salaries added to create a 25-man roster.

The average payroll in the AL East is much greater than the rest of the league with more than a $20 million advantage over the other two divisions. Surprisingly, the AL West comes in lower than the AL Central despite big payrolls from the Texas Rangers and Los Angeles Angels. There is a great deal of disparity within the divisions.
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As a matter of self-preservation, I don’t listen to what Curt Schilling says very often. The guy could pitch, however, so when he’s talking about throwing baseballs, not the other stuff, I tune in. When he happened to be on television last year (talking about throwing baseballs), he said something about “going to the well”. Schilling was referring to a starting pitcher getting into trouble — giving up a few hits, walking a batter — and then having to dip into a metaphorical “well” of grit and determination (and most likely velocity) to get out of the inning without further damage.

We know baseball games find themselves at fulcrum points: high leverage situations where the outcome of one at-bat can tip the balance of win expectancy one way or the other. Thinking about Schilling’s “well” comment further, I wondered – how does a starting pitcher’s velocity change in different leverage situations? Does it increase above the pitcher’s usual average when men are on base or when the game hangs in the balance, as we might expect it to?

Does the well really exist?

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Wednesday’s news that Josh Hamilton could be facing an imminent suspension from Major League Baseball has set off a wave of speculation regarding not only the possible cause of the suspension, but also its potential length. Given Hamilton’s history, some have assumed he may have had a relapse of his earlier substance-abuse problems, triggering a possible suspension under MLB’s Joint Drug Agreement (JDA).

Although we presently have very little concrete information regarding Hamilton’s situation, here is what we do know: Mike DiGiovanna broke the news on Wednesday afternoon that Hamilton was in New York City meeting with MLB officials regarding a potential suspension. Ken Rosenthal reported later that, according to an unnamed baseball executive, Hamilton’s transgression was “worse” than a performance enhancing drug (PED) violation.

More alleged details emerged Wednesday evening, with Jon Heyman reporting Hamilton had confessed to a drug relapse involving “at least cocaine.” Heyman went on to report that Hamilton would be placed in MLB’s drug-treatment program as a first-time violator.

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This is clearly a toy I love playing around with. Please just don’t ask me what it means. I don’t know what it means to say that Henderson Alvarez almost has Felix Hernandez’s changeup. It’s just a statistical observation, like any other. This is all way too new for me to know if it has any substance. If nothing else, it adds some color, right? We are a people somewhat obsessed with player comps. We love comps for young players, because they allow us to pretend like we can see their futures. This is kind of along those lines, at least with regard to the unproven. Carlos Martinez is unproven. Let’s analyze Carlos Martinez.

The Cardinals intend for Martinez to be a starting pitcher, a role in which he’s only dabbled in the major leagues. At this point he’s the favorite to open the year as the No. 5 starter, and while the Cardinals have pursued other arms on the market, that has more to do with a potential lack of depth. Of course, there are Martinez skeptics. There are skeptics of every pitcher who has yet to start and succeed. Frequently, those skeptics come away looking smart! But we don’t know if Martinez is going to develop. All we know is his age, and the kind of arm he has.

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Last week, Nick Punto informed the Diamondbacks that he’d be taking the year off, deciding not to report to camp even though he had signed a minor league contract with the club earlier this winter. Though he claimed he wasn’t retiring, Punto is 37 and just put up a 73 wRC+ for Oakland, so it’s easy to imagine that his career is over. Despite his small stature and non-existent power, Punto managed to turn a solid glove, positional versatility, and a good eye (career 10.4% walk rate) into a career that spanned parts of 14 seasons.

He found himself as the tongue-in-cheek face of one of the most shocking transactions in baseball history — 2012’s “Nick Punto trade,” which you might remember more for including Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, and a quarter-billion dollars worth of contracts — and carved himself a niche as baseball’s foremost jersey-shredding expert. As far as careers go, you could do a lot worse than all that, not to mention the approximately $23 million he made during his playing days.

Wait! Don’t go anywhere. This isn’t going to be a full Nick Punto career retrospective. I swear. What this is going to be is a hope, a prayer, that Punto’s probable departure from the game takes along with it one of baseball’s most frustrating blights, the thing that he might be known for above all else: the head-first slide, particularly into first base.

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