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With Hunter Pence Out, Giants Have Options

Spring Training statistics might not matter, but injuries can certainly make an impact on a team’s outlook heading into the season. After being hit by a pitch in yesterday’s game against the Chicago Cubs, Hunter Pence is expected to be out six to eight weeks with a broken forearm. Missing the first month of the season is far from a catastrophic loss for the San Francisco Giants as they defend their World Series crown, but if they want to fill Pence’s vacated role from outside the organization, there are multiple teams with too many outfielders.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, Boston Red Sox, San Diego Padres, and Cleveland Indians are all teams that should be willing to move outfielders this spring, per Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated. The Dodgers currently have Yasiel Puig, Carl Crawford, Andre Ethier, Joc Pederson, and Scott Van Slyke in their outfield with Andre Ethier apparently the odd man out. The Dodgers are eager to move Ethier and are reportedly willing to pay around half of the $56 million owed to Ethier over the next three years. A trade with the Dodgers is not impossible for the Giants, but as Dave Cameron recently noted, some rivals rarely trade with each other. The Giants and Dodgers have completed just one trade since 1985, when they traded Mark Sweeney to the Dodgers in August 2007 for a player to be named later that turned into Travis Denker.

Outside of the difficulty of trading with a rival, the Giants current outfield poses problems with taking on a long term deal for a player who expects to start. The Giants currently have an interesting composition of present and future. At 31, Pence is the youngest projected outfield starter for the Giants with Angel Pagan and Nori Aoki expected to start in center field and left field, respectively. Pence is also signed through 2018 and has the contract with the longest duration among the Giants outfielders. He is not the only Giant signed past 2015. Angel Pagan has one more year to go after 2015 and is scheduled to receive $10 million in 2016. The Giants have a club option on Aoki for 2016 at just $5.5 million. It is conceivable that the Giants projected outfield for 2015 will be the same for 2016. The age, term, and relatively small amounts owed to Pagan and Aoki do not preclude a long term solution for the outfield. However, even if Ethier were to cost the Giants under $10 million per year, a three year commitment through his Age-35 season to cover one month of missed time is likely more than the Giants would want to take on.
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Creating an Expected Payroll for all MLB Teams

When it comes to making demands about improving a team’s roster, a fan’s simplest complaint is that the team is not spending enough. Ownership is the easiest target for criticism because they sign the checks. There is a lot of information hidden from the public and even the players when it comes to a team’s finances. Many assumptions are made, but still questions persist: Are the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves cheap? Are the Detroit Tigers outspending their market for a shot at a championship?

Without delving deeply into the finances of individual teams, the answers are not easy to come by. Even if everyone got a look inside the books, there would be reasonable differences regarding subjective definitions of the word cheap. What we can do is take a look at recent spending patterns within baseball. Looking at the known financial aspects of a franchise and attendance, a comparison can be made within the ranks of ownership. The owners might very well all be cheap, and that we cannot know for sure, but we can find out which franchises are cheaper.
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Importance of Market Size, Attendance and TV Revenue on Payroll

The New York Yankees’ and Los Angeles Dodgers’ payrolls continue to dominate when it comes to paying players. Not coincidentally, those two teams have the best local television deals in Major League Baseball. On average, the two will receive more than $300 million annually over the course of their deals, per Forbes. As more teams cash in with big local television deals — the Arizona Diamondbacks are the latest — it’s becoming clear no team will receive anywhere near the haul the Dodgers and Yankees have enjoyed. How much those local deals impact payroll is less clear.

The revenue from local television contracts is subject to revenue sharing, with one-third of the annual rights money going into the overall pool. The money produced from an ownership stake in a television network does not go into the revenue sharing pool. Local television deals are not the only source of revenue for teams. Teams are getting more and more money from national television deals. Smaller market teams are getting revenue sharing money from the bigger teams. Attendance at 81 home games brings in a great deal of revenue. Then, for that money to translate to payroll, there needs to be an ownership group willing to spend the money they receive.

Payroll does not directly translate to wins, and there is evidence that overall, the correlation between payroll and wins is decreasing. However, the correlation between wins and Opening Day payroll last season (.28) is in line with the the four year average (.29). Looking at a number of different factors and comparing them to payroll can provide a better idea of the factors affecting spending.

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Brian Dozier And Extensions for Position Players

Last spring, Mike Trout, Jason Kipnis, Starling Marte, Jedd Gyorko, Matt Carpenter, Yan Gomes, and Andrelton Simmons all received contract extensions buying out free agent years before they had even hit arbitration. The spring before last Anthony Rizzo, Paul Goldschmidt, and Allen Craig signed similar deals. The deals ranged from Gomes’ $23 million guarantee to Mike Trout’s $144.5 million deal. As players file into camp and prove their health, more extensions are likely on the way.

The recent pitcher contract extensions tend to pay more for potential, but on the position player side, present production is more prominent. Of the players signed to extensions in the last two springs, every player had already shown himself to be at least above average, if not an All-Star quality level player. Here are the players who have signed the past two springs as well as statistics for the season prior to signing the extension.

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Corey Kluber Foremost Among Pitcher Extension Candidates

Contract extensions for younger players have been on the rise in recent years. Over the past three springs, 38 players with under six years of service have signed extensions buying out free agent years. Twenty-four of those 38 contract extensions were signed by players who had yet to reach arbitration. Eight contract extensions have gone to starting pitchers and seven out of those eight pitchers had not reached arbitration, with Homer Bailey as the lone exception.

Here are the extensions given to pre-arbitration eligible pitchers over the last three springs, with Julio Teheran’s Valentine’s Day deal included as well, from MLB Trade Rumors.
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2015 National League Payroll Breakdown

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.

NL Payroll by DIvision
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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2015 American League Payroll Breakdown

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.

AL Division Payroll
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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Single-Pitch Outings: 2014 Year in Review

In 2014, relievers appeared in 14,459 games. In more than 90% of those games, the reliever faced multiple hitters, but in 1,266 appearances, the reliever pitched to just one batter. In just about ten percent of those appearances, the reliever made just one pitch. This post looks back at the 139 reliever appearances that lasted just one pitch, according to Baseball-Reference Play-Index Data.

The one-pitch pitchers skewed left with 81 appearances compared to 58 for right-handers. The pitchers were incredibly successful, allowing only 15 hits, and only four extra base hits. One of those hits was a home run. Josh Outman of the Cleveland Indians made just one pitch on May 31, 2014 against the Colorado Rockies. It did not go well.
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Yoan Moncada and the Yankees Odd Spending Habits

When the New York Yankees make a signing, it is big news in baseball. When the Yankees fail to make to a big signing, it is even bigger news. The Yankees targeted Yoan Moncada. They worked him out multiple times. They offered the potential star $25 million, willing to commit $50 million with penalties, showing they believed in his talent. Yet they let the rival Boston Red Sox outbid them by $13 million.

The Yankees are rich and they spend like it. In 2015, their payroll will grow past $200 million for the sixth time in seven years. One offseason ago, the Yankees made $483 million in salary commitments to free agents. Just last summer, the Yankees blew past the international spending limits to sign the biggest international free agent class in Major League Baseball. The high level of spending is confusing when the difference in offers to Moncada is less than the amount they committed to pay a 39-year old Carlos Beltran in 2016 and the total cost is roughly one-third of the commitment they made to obtain Masahiro Tanaka.

As Miles Wray pointed out earlier this month, with the exception of last offseason, the Yankees have used considerable restraint in free agency since winning their last World Series in 2009. The first few sensible years made sense. They went on a spree after 2008, signing Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia, and A.J. Burnett to big contracts that helped them to the World Series. They continued winning, putting up 95 wins in 2010 and followed that season up with 97 wins and 95 wins the next two years. Even before the 95-win 2012 season, Yankees ownership put a plan in place to save the team millions of dollars.
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MLB 2015 Payrolls: Dodgers and Mariners See Big Jumps

With all of the arbitration cases heard and the major free agent signings completed, save for perhaps a Cuban free agent or two and a few relievers, we can come up with a solid estimate the Opening Day Payrolls for 2015. In 1998, the Baltimore Orioles’ payroll of $70.4 million topped all of Major League Baseball followed by fifteen straight seasons of New York Yankees payroll dominance. For the first time this centruy, the Los Angeles Dodgers finally unseated the Yankees last year. Despite Alex Rodriguez‘s suspended salary returning to the Yankees payroll and the signing of Chase Headley, the Dodgers remain well ahead. Trades for Jimmy Rollins and Howie Kendrick, the signing of Brandon McCarthy and agreeing to pay for much of Matt Kemp’s salary this season were more than enough to keep the crown for highest MLB payroll.

MLB Payroll 2015
Figures from Cots. Minimum salaries of $507,500 added to guaranteed contracts to complete the 25-man roster.

For the second straight year, the Dodgers will have the highest payroll in baseball as the season starts. The Dodgers’ $266 million payroll figure appears staggering, more than 25% higher than the Yankees second place number and more than the ninth (Philadelphia Phillies) and tenth (Toronto Blue Jays) highest payrolls combined. However, the Dodgers’ buying power is still not at the level of the Yankees’ last decade. As a percentage of total team salaries, the Yankees’ payroll from 2004-2010 averaged 8.2%, never dipping below 7.5% before finally falling to 7.3% in 2011. The Dodgers’ payroll in 2015 accounts for 7.3% of total team payroll.
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