Top of the Order: Let’s Review Payrolls
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
As I mentioned in my intro column on Friday, my main responsibility here at FanGraphs is updating the RosterResource payroll pages, which give a great overview of all 30 teams’ payrolls and where they stand in relation to the luxury tax lines. I like to view payrolls with the understanding that each team is going to have its own normal range; as such, I find it best to look at the 2024 Dodgers relative to the 2023 Dodgers and the 2024 A’s relative to the 2023 A’s. So, with that in mind, I put the teams into five buckets.
All payrolls listed below are the “real payroll” for the teams rather than their luxury tax payroll. Official 2023 payrolls have not yet been reported, so I’ve used the RosterResource payrolls for both 2023 and 2024.
The Big Gainers (at least 10% increase since 2023)
1. Orioles ($66M to $98M, a 48% increase)
The O’s had nowhere to go but up after running a bare-bones payroll for last year’s 101-win campaign. The big increases came from arbitration raises and trading for Corbin Burnes ($15,637,500).
2. Diamondbacks ($124M to $168M, a 36% increase)
Owner Ken Kendrick wasn’t kidding when he said he was willing to add payroll to keep the team in World Series contention. The Diamondbacks didn’t lose anyone significant in free agency, and new additions Eugenio Suárez, Eduardo Rodriguez, Joc Pederson, and Jordan Montgomery will combine to earn almost $60 million this season.
3. Dodgers ($236M to $314M, a 33% increase)
The Dodgers reined in spending in 2023 with an eye on having maximum flexibility for this season, and goodness did they flex it. They committed over $1 billion in free agency, 36% of the entire league’s total.
4. Royals ($91M to $116M, a 27% increase)
Kansas City’s big move was the mega-extension for Bobby Witt Jr., with free agency expenditures large in quantity (seven MLB free agents) but low in big splashes. (Seth Lugo’s $36 million contract was the largest.) Still, they look markedly improved.
5. Rays ($79M to $97M, a 23% increase)
The Rays were pretty quiet in free agency, but their payroll is up quite a bit even after trading away Tyler Glasnow and Manuel Margot. The large collection of arbitration-eligible players accounts for most of the gain here.
6. Pirates ($70M to $84M, a 20% increase)
This is similar to the Rays’ situation; Aroldis Chapman ($10.5 million) was Pittsburgh’s biggest free agent commitment. David Bednar’s arbitration years and Mitch Keller’s extension could keep the Pirates in the $80M+ range for a while.
7. Nationals ($109M to $130M, a 20% increase)
In the final year of his contract, Patrick Corbin is earning $11 million more than he did in 2023, and his raise accounts for over half of Washington’s increase.
8. Astros ($201M to $241M, a 19% increase)
This year, the Astros almost certainly will pay the luxury tax for the first time under owner Jim Crane. Josh Hader signed the biggest free agent deal for a reliever (by present value), and yet he has just the fifth-highest salary on the team.
9. Reds ($87M to $104M, a 19% increase)
Cincinnati had a very Royals-y offseason. Jeimer Candelario’s three-year, $45 million deal was the largest signing the Reds made, but add the $13 million he’ll earn this season with the salaries of newcomers Emilio Pagán, Frankie Montas, and Brent Suter and you get $37.5 million of fresh commitments to four players. That explains the increase in payroll even without Joey Votto on the team anymore.
10. Cubs ($190M to $224M, an 18% increase)
The Cubs waited awhile to strike in free agency, but they’ve now got four players earning over $20 million and another three above $10 million.
11. Braves ($205M to $230M, a 13% increase)
The Braves added more complementary players from the outside (Reynaldo López, Jarred Kelenic, Aaron Bummer) because their extension-heavy strategy creating few holes to plug. Austin Riley, Matt Olson, and Sean Murphy’s raises combine for $12 million in extra salary.
12. Yankees ($272M to $301M, an 11% increase)
Juan Soto’s hefty $31 million salary in his walk year explains the Yankees’ payroll jump, as the Marcus Stroman contract and arbitration raises are essentially negated by the salaries of Josh Donaldson, Luis Severino, and Frankie Montas (among others) coming off the books.
The Moderate Gainers (between 5% and 10% increase since 2023)
13. Giants ($196M to $208M, a 6% increase)
The Giants look significantly better on paper with Jung Hoo Lee, Blake Snell, Matt Chapman, and Jorge Soler, but they’re not actually that much more expensive. Joc Pederson, Brandon Crawford, Sean Manaea, Alex Wood, and Ross Stripling all underperformed in 2023 and are now playing elsewhere.
14. Rangers ($214M to $226M, a 6% increase)
The World Series champs did their big shopping in the two offseasons before last year, and many of the core contributors from the 2023 roster are still with the team. The largest contract Texas gave out this free agency was Tyler Mahle’s two-year, $22 million deal, leading to a minimal increase in payroll.
15. Blue Jays ($215M to $226M, a 5% increase)
After missing out on Shohei Ohtani, the Blue Jays had a low-key offseason. Yariel Rodriguez signed for $32 million but started out in the minors to get stretched out, and rather than making big expenditures the team will instead be relying on improvements from stars like Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
16. Athletics ($59M to $61M, a 5% increase)
Well, at least their relative change is actually qualifying as a moderate increase? By absolute change, this is essentially nothing; their highest paid player is Ross Stripling, who’s earning $12.5 million, but the Giants are covering $3.25 million of that, meaning the A’s themselves aren’t paying a single player eight figures.
Largely Unchanged (Within 5% of their 2023 payroll)
17. Cardinals ($178M to $181M, a 1% increase)
The Redbirds got most of their offseason shopping out of the way early, locking down Sonny Gray, Kyle Gibson, and Lance Lynn before the Winter Meetings. The Gray deal is heavily backloaded, though, keeping things steady.
18. Guardians (steady at $98M, a 0.4% increase)
The Guardians will look to bounce back from a sub-.500 year with largely the same personnel.
19. Phillies (steady at $246M, a 0.2% decrease)
The Phillies tend to allocate their contracts evenly and will run it back with essentially the same squad that brought them to within one win of their second straight NL pennant.
20. Mariners ($140M to $139M, a 0.7% decrease)
Seattle made plenty of moves without adding payroll because, as you might have expected, trader Jerry Dipoto’s swaps kept the ledger pretty balanced.
The Moderate Slashers (between 5% and 10% decrease since 2023)
21. Mets ($346M to $324M, a 7% decrease)
The Mets’ payroll remains stratospheric, but nearly $70 million is money paid to other teams for James McCann, Justin Verlander, and Max Scherzer. They’re projected to be all the way down to $159 million in commitments for 2025, with no huge arbitration raises set to add to that significantly.
22.Tigers ($121M to $109M, a 10% decrease)
Don’t confuse cheaper with worse. The Tigers should be a much better team this year; they just no longer have Miguel Cabrera’s $32 million on the books.
23.Red Sox ($199M to $178M, a 10% decrease)
Boston’s offseason was many things, but full-throttle it wasn’t. Adding injury to insult, the team’s big free-agent addition, Lucas Giolito, will miss all of 2024 after undergoing UCL repair surgery.
24.Marlins ($110M to $99M, a 10% decrease)
Peter Bendix had a quiet first offseason with the Marlins, with Tim Anderson ($5 million) being his only free agent expenditure.
The Big Slashers (at least 10% decrease since 2023)
25.Brewers ($126M to $110M, a 13% decrease)
Milwaukee traded Corbin Burnes, brought back Brandon Woodruff on a reduced salary, and signed Rhys Hoskins to a backloaded contract that adds only $10 million to the 2024 payroll. Even so, the Brewers are 3–0 to start the season and should still contend for the NL Central title.
26.Rockies ($172M to $147M, a 15% decrease)
Colorado’s payments for Nolan Arenado went down from $21 million last year to $5 million this year, creating almost the entire difference. The team’s only free-agent additions were Jacob Stallings ($2 million) and Dakota Hudson ($1.5 million).
27.White Sox ($177M to $146M, an 18% decrease)
With Liam Hendriks, Yasmani Grandal, Tim Anderson, Elvis Andrus, Aaron Bummer, Mike Clevinger, and Dylan Cease all gone, the White Sox are dealing with a drastic decline in payroll and talent — two roster attributes that could continue to crater next offseason, when both Yoán Moncada and Eloy Jiménez could become free agents.
28.Angels ($215M to $174M, a 19% decrease)
The Angels ducked under the luxury tax threshold by just $30,000 after letting five players go on waivers last August, and they won’t come anywhere close this year. Anthony Rendon and Mike Trout alone combine for nearly 45% of that.
29.Twins ($159M to $128M, a 20% decrease)
Owner Jim Pohlad said payroll would go down, and it certainly did, even as the Twins look primed to repeat as AL Central champs. Carlos Santana ($5.25 million) was Minnesota’s “big” free agent signing.
30.Padres ($255M to $167M, a 34% decrease)
The Padres followed through on plans to bring payroll down to a more manageable level to come into compliance with MLB’s debt-servicing rules, and they didn’t replace Juan Soto in any meaningful way, either.
…
To be clear, nothing I’m about to say is a dig on A’s fans. They’ve got what I would say is by far the toughest situation of any fanbase in the league, with their favorite team about to abandon them for three nomadic years in an unknown temporary home (Sacramento, perhaps? Salt Lake City?) before heading to a Las Vegas stadium that has been rendered on paper but entirely unclear in its real-life funding. (Nevada will chip in a hefty $380 million of what will be at least a $1 billion project.) With that all laid out, though, the A’s attendance has been nothing short of incredible, and I don’t mean that positively.
ESPN has a handy tracker for average team attendance, and the gap between the 15th-place A’s and 14th-place Marlins (remember, only 15 MLB parks have games during the opening weekend) is about 12,500 per game, nearly as large as the gap between the Marlins and the no. 10 Mariners. The boycotted Opening Day was actually the best attended of the three games, with over 13,000 tickets sold, though it would appear only a fraction actually went to the game. Instead, they bought tickets to access the parking lot for their protest.
Without protests and boycotts to artificially inflate attendance, the A’s may have a tough time cracking 10,000 fans at any point this season, and the team will exit Oakland with a whimper.
…
It appears as if Joey Bart will be on the move shortly, with his expected-all-spring jettisoning from the Giants’ roster finally coming with a DFA on Sunday. Bart hit well in spring training, with a .414/.526/.448 line in 38 plate appearances. He made the Opening Day roster as San Francisco’s third catcher, but he was never going to overtake Patrick Bailey and Tom Murphy on the depth chart so long as they stayed healthy.
Bart hit just .219/.288/.335 in 502 plate appearances with the Giants, and his -6 defensive runs saved in 156 games behind the plate don’t give any value back on the other side of the ball. That said, he was still the 2nd overall pick in 2018, and I don’t see him clearing waivers. Teams who could look to upgrade their backup catcher spot include the A’s, Diamondbacks, Braves, and Pirates.
Jon Becker manages RosterResource's team payroll pages, assists with all other aspects of RosterResource, and also dabbles in creating new features as a Junior Developer. Follow him at your own peril: @jonbecker_ on Twitter and @jon-becker.com on Bluesky.
“Teams who could look to upgrade their backup catcher spot include the A’s, Diamondbacks, Braves, and Pirates.”
I know it’s contextual based on Sean Murphy’s injury, but it’s funny to see the Braves included on that list.
They’re going to try to make their back up catcher great again with Tromp. But I’m not sure his numbers are bigly enough to match what they had on opening day.
Sell the team, John.
Boycott seems to mean something different than it used to, if fans are buying tickets to do so.
I guess it’s more like a sit-in protest? Folks who did that had to pay for food if they actually got served.
Yeah, that’s probably a more accurate descriptor.
Monetary boycotts are not the only form of boycott. A boycott is simply a withdrawal from or refusal to participate in something as a form of protest. That usually means refusing to buy or pay for something, but it doesn’t have to mean that. If people decide to stop using their public libraries or parks to protest something their city government’s doing, for example, that’s still a boycott, even though those people are still paying the taxes that fund those things.
A monetary boycott in Oakland would only strengthen the owner’s argument that there aren’t enough willing customers in the area to keep the team there. If people stop buying tickets entirely, then of course the team will need to leave. So a withdrawal of their attendance is the only effective form of boycott available to them. They buy tickets, to show that there are still customers willing to do so, but refuse to actually attend, as a form of protest. That’s still a boycott.
How effective is a non-monetary boycott?
If it involves transferring money to the group being boycotted, it isn’t usually very effective. It’s still going to Fisher. It’s like the equivalent of retweeting a post or column you hate to dunk on it–you’re still giving them what they want.
I can understand how sometimes you can make this work, embarrassing the target in a way that costs them much more than the money you are giving them. I don’t think this is one of those times.
I think it COULD be effective, but, you’d need to thread the needle by:
buying the cheapest tickets
people carpool in together/take public transport to lessen the $$ the team gets from parking (though they’re still getting the revenue from whoever’s cars are used for tailgating)
team gets nothing from concessions/souvenirs. That IS significant revenue for teams, that $25-100 EVERY person spends in the ballpark on foord, drink, clothes, etc.
So the team is getting some revenue, but, not much to turn any sort of profit.
& then you need the publicity..which is where I think this falls apart. How much more embarrassing news can the A’s generate at this point?
I think last year’s “reverse boycott” was a great idea. Most of the year you do a more traditional boycott of the team… and then one day you point out that “we can be supportive fans if we choose to be. So give us a reason, John.”
I would be surprised if the Pirates went for Bart–though you can usually count on them to dumpster-dive on post-hype prospects, they’re pretty full up at catcher. Early reports seem to be that Henry Davis has improved enough to catch, Yasmani Grandal is rehabbing to team with him this year, Endy Rodriguez should be back next year, and even Jason Delay is a decent framing-first backup guy although he can’t hit much.
welp! tasty, tasty words.
I was kind of hoping the A’s would have less than the 307,000 fans they had at home games in 1979. It looks like they’re on pace for about 554,000. If they keep buying tickets in protest.
I’m really hoping they stop because nothing would be more interesting than seeing what happens if zero people go out.
Fisher would probably say that is why they can’t compete in Oakland – because fans don’t come out. Jerry Reinsdorf plays this card every few years. He tries to convince people that if they give him money, he will entertain them and hopes they forget that the relationship is supposed to go in the opposite direction.
This is why TV money is relatively important to team spending habits–it gives them a floor where they know they can commit this number of dollars to the team in this and future years. Attendance is a bit more unreliable that way, at least for most teams. There are a few teams that rely heavily on higher attendance to generate revenue (Cardinals, Brewers, Rockies) but they’re the exception rather than the rule.
This is also why Fisher’s decision to leave the Bay Area is such a terrible move. They’re making something like $65M a year from their current contract. Once they leave the Bay Area, they lose it. They’ll probably wind up in the $45M range in Las Vegas in current dollars, more like where the Royals are at.
I have been thinking about that a lot as the White Sox threaten to move to markets that are a quarter the size of Chicago. I don’t think the big money comes from TV anymore. Now it comes from how much public money you can convince them to give you for your real estate and stadium. This also often doesn’t count as “revenue” since it is more eliminating an expense, so it is easier to hide it from players and other owners.
I agree..esp if the owner has some shell companies that own most of the land around the stadium,but, aren’t directly under the auspices of the team. They get the $$ from the parking/rent from bars/restauants/luxury apartments, etc., but, is not team revenue.
Not necessarily in the case of Major League Baseball. Whether it’s in-person attendance including food/parking sales, buying a TV subscription, or merch sales; where does most of the money to improve the roster come from in the first place?
It is the team’s job to supply an entertainment product I want to buy. If a restaurant told you they would serve better food in the future if you bought the crap they were serving now, you wouldn’t eat there.
Restaurants aren’t monopolies.
Neither are the White Sox, whether you consider the industry entertainment, professional sports, or even the very narrow field of Chicago major league baseball teams. No matter where I am, there will be other things I can do with my entertainment dollar that will be more worthwhile than watching bad baseball.
As I was implying, Major League Baseball is an exception to the way it works in most industries, so most comparisons are apples and oranges and just don’t work the same way. For one thing, even for good teams, the talent level is expected to vary year by year rather than designing the entire business around a set standard.
In the case of MLB, if a team can’t compete as they are and can’t afford to spend enough money to immediately make it better, then they need to rebuild. Once that rebuilding starts to come to fruition, then fans will come back (both in person and watching on TV) and they’ll then have more money to spend on missing pieces to make the team even better and hopefully get back to the playoffs. Then they get extra playoff revenue and still good fan support to keep the contention window open as long as they can.
For my team, they went through a rebuild, got two playoff wins out of it, and are in another rebuild 3 years later. While they were “good” they brought in an out of date, unsympathetic figure as a manager. Now they have elevated the man who failed as director of player development to GM and want public money for a stadium, while the last stadium that was paid for with public money is still being paid off.
They spent some more while they were good, but not all that much and balked at taking one more step to be better. They never spent the money from attendance on developing young talent. They also claim the new stadium will revitalize the area in which it would be built and make money for the city. They claimed all this 30 years ago when the last stadium was built but that neighborhood is pretty much the same.
So when JR says he needs my money to make his team better, I say “fool me once…” and when he says he needs my money or he will take his sad team to Nashville, I say “don’t let the door hot you on the way out.”
You obviously haven’t discussed this with Bob Nutting. I’m pretty sure he has a different idea on how it’s supposed to work
To be fair, even the good late-10s Oakland teams had pretty dismal attendance. Is it worth a half-hearted move to a small city that already has two sports? Nope. But let’s not pretend that the A’s were being heavily supported either.
Then again, one of the bigger reasons for that poor attendance is due to Fisher neglecting his contracted responsibilities to maintain the Colisseum, so Fisher is still the bad guy.
The reality is that other than the 88-92 glory years, the A’s have always had bad attendance. There’s an (in)famous SI article from the early 70s in the middle of the first Oakland glory run asking why the best team in baseball plays in an empty stadium. Attendance has always been bad. Even when the stadium was new.
I honestly don’t know if a new stadium would solve the issue. The Bay Area market is big, but now that the Giants are in downtown SF and easy to get to on BART I don’t know if there’s a way to crack it. Oakland is a great baseball city, but it’s a small baseball market.
The only real (local) move was to get the A’s to San Jose, but that isn’t happening now. Ownership for the last 20 years has been transparently parasitical – maybe someone else could have gotten it done, who knows, but that ship has sailed.
They are on pace for less than that. After the first game they had 3,837 then 5,425 and finally 4,118 for an average of just 4,460. They have 77 home games left. If they hit that average for all of them it will be 343,420 plus the 26,902 already banked gets them to only 343,420. Obviously way more that the 307,000 but WAY short of half a million. What would it take to miss your “goal” of 307K? If they miss the 4,460 by 823 fans per game (not hard to imagine since these were all opening day or weekend games!) then the new average of 3,637 over 77 games plus the 26,902 would result in about 306,951 (technically lower, but probably a tie at best. I just looked up the actual attendance in 1979 (306,763) so obviously my average would need dropped by about 3 fans per game.
As an A’s fan since 1988 I hope they fall short of 300K.
SELL THE TEAM!
I would really like to know who is buying tickets to these games. I remember there were always high school students who didn’t care about baseball who would go to games because the beer vendors didn’t card. Is that who is going? Whoever has the Athletics best should dig into this.
I think there must be a floor for the number of people who will buy a ticket to an MLB game. We will probably find out where that floor is this season. But we still don’t know who goes.
Question for you, or any Oakland fans: What is the perception from A’s fans of people who go to the coliseum just to see some ball? I live in Portland and usually make a bay area trip once a year and catch a couple games. SF was last year so was going to do OAK this year but I want to support the fans.
I’m an out of area fan so I don’t feel like I can speak directly to that. I also think there is a difference between buying a ticket direct vs from another fan via a legit website since even if the team somehow still gets a sliver it should be minimal.
My impression from other A’s fans online is that they are generally not hostile or angry towards those who do attend, but I’m sure no one would think anything of it if you make your own green SELL shirts and wear those to the game.
I looked and I don’t think they are selling them anymore through https://www.oakland68s.org/
But there may be another site they used.
https://www.oaklandish.com/products/sell-tee-kelly-white
And only $15, since (IIRC) Oaklandish is printing them as they’re ordered and selling them at cost.
Thanks! I searched the Oaklandish site for “Sell” and got nothing, maybe it was me, maybe their search. I might have to order one to always wear under my Eric Chavez jersey.
Doing a little digging on those 307,000 fans. There are 4 home games that do not have attendance listed so the actual total is probably a little higher.
Anyway, only 5 games have a reported attendance above 10,000: 3 against the Yankees, one against the Red Sox, and one against the Twins (home opener).
Meanwhile, two games have a reported attendance of under 1,000 (!). One was in September which makes sense. The other, though, was in April.
The four 1979 A’s home games with no attendance listed were the first games of doubleheaders.
Yeah, there was a game where something like 650 people came out. Can you imagine being at that game?
(Also, those four were doubleheaders)
Recognizing Miggy was a $32mil albatross on Detroit’s payroll puts his contribution to the team in a new light. Is there some analysis of the opportunity cost of paying for dead weight on the back end of these contracts compared to spending the same dollars on replacement level players?
When it’s all sorted, I suspect Miggy had great years with the team but ultimately pulled the operation into a decade of irrelevance.
I think that’s too harsh. Miggy’s contract was certainly large, but there were worse deals handed out in that timeframe (*coughJordanZimmermancough*). And he was really only in decline from 2017 onwards, and only 2019 and 2022 were super awful. So seven years where the team was irrelevant, since 2016 wasn’t on him where they fell just short of the playoffs, their pitching staff outside of Fulmer and Verlander and the 2-13 record against the division-leading Indians were to blame there.
Also, 2021 and 2023 they were a spoiler team for opponents. So not even totally irrelevant there.
Cabrera’s extension might be the worst deal from a team’s perspective this side of Pujols and Strasburg. Maybe even worse. I believe it bought out two years of team control, where he put up 5.2 and 4.6 fWAR. That was already something the team had. He then put up one more really good year (5.1 fWAR) before putting up -3.0 fWAR for the remaining seven years on the deal.
Strasburg put up eight starts of no value whatsoever and then still has 3 years, 105 million to account for when he’s functionally retired. Would arguably have been a better use of that money to just set it on fire.
Pujols… I would say between fan hatred of the deal, -3.8 fWAR for the Angels from 2017 to 2021, and the sheer amount of money straight-up wasted, he was a much larger albatross. Moreso because instead of biting the bullet and trying to find a better solution while actively competing, they kept running him out there year after year to continue sucking. The Tigers were bad post 2016 and weren’t trying to compete for most of that seven year downturn. The Angels were bad from 2015-present and still suck. Arguably they’re in a worse position now, whereas the Tigers look ready to start improving.
I’m not saying Miggy wasn’t an albatross, but to say he’s the cause of the Tigers failure from 2017-2023 is too harsh.
Pujols was still a good player until 2015, and he was only below replacement level with the bat in 2017 while mostly playing DH where he technically wasn’t hurting the Angels on defense in those later years. The Angels kept running Pujols out there because they didn’t actually have anybody who was outhitting him for the 3 out of every 5 games that Ohtani was either pitching or resting (or injured) back then. (Even guys like Upton and Rendon wound up providing worse offensive value.) Besides, they weren’t truly actively competing after the first month or two of each of those seasons, anyway.
Even when the Angels released him, Pujols was still one of their best 9 hitters if they had just made the obvious move to play Ward in the OF full time (where everyone of note was injured) and played Pujols at 1B.
What I remember most about Miggy’s deal is the furious rage of the national press during the 2012 and 2013 seasons at the idea that the Tigers should not sign him to a huge extension. And being completely unwilling to hear that fact that it was almost assuredly going to turn into a massive albatross.
In terms of WAR, what was Cabrera’s performance during the contract?
11.9 fWAR. Which is bad over the term of the deal, but only going off of WAR is always flawed. So I don’t care.
If only using WAR to assess the Miggy deal is flawed… please explain how.
Because the WAR argument looks like a slam dunk to me.
Yeah, if that was a free agent deal that accounting would work. But they already had him under team control for the first two years.
Aside from the fact that Mike Ilitch almost certainly directed the scorched earth approach that Dombrowski used his last few years in town (because he wanted a ring before he died, which is understandable, but definitely throws the accounting out of whack), WAR value is most important for a team that is contending or trying to contend, as the Angels were during the Pujols contract. The Tigers were, with a generous interpretation, not even seriously attempting to contend from 2019-2023, so Miggy’s bad contract mattered less. That’s not to say it wasn’t a bad contract; as I said above, he absolutely was an albatross. But comparing it to the Strasburg and Pujols contracts, the former of which is a complete and utter waste before the ink was even dry, and the latter affected a team that was trying to contend for the entirety of its length, is disingenuous imo. It’s an apples to oranges comparison.
I don’t think it’s remotely fair to say that he “ultimately pulled the operation into a decade of irrelevance” as the OP stated, not in the slightest. Moreso since it hasn’t even been a decade since they were last relevant even with the most generous interpretation. It’s just a nonsensical assertion. If you wanted to make that assessment for Pujols and the Angels, I could buy it. But not Miggy.
The cause of all business failures is never the employees, in this case the players, but the management, in this case the owner and GM.
“The cause of all business failures is never the employees”
What happened to the British auto industry in the 1960s and 1970s?
They couldn’t compete. That isn’t an employee issue.
“had great years” is a pretty strong euphemism for “won multiple MVPs on his way to wearing a Tigers hat in the HoF;” by this logic, Mike Trout is a burden to the Angels. C’mon now.
Miggy’s contract wasn’t the only thing that demolished the Tigers. Dave Dombrowski’s scorched earth policy of trading all of the good and interesting prospects for short term pieces. Alex Avila took over as GM not long after and was completely and totally incompetent. The result has been a mid team ever since 2016.
This.
Though it’s fair to question how many of Dombrowski’s moves (including the Miggy extension) rthe last couple of years were at the owner’s direction/in an “all in” mode to win a WS before Mike Ilitch died.
He did a pretty good job of threading the needle for a # of years, but, the last couple of year he made some terrible moves.Before 2013, sometimes he’d trade prospects (wtih about 100% ratio of the move working out in his favor),but,.then he’d trade veteran Curtis Granderson & Edwin Jackson for Austin Jackson & Scherzer.
& Avila was terrible. Bad move from the start & held on to him way too long. Biggest issue was lack of international players & poor player development.
Dombrowski was fired in 2015 because he didn’t go scorched earth, rather doing the opposite (trading Price and Cespedes et al for prospects).
I’m surprised you didn’t include the Rays as a team that could use some catching.
I expect Bart to suit up for several teams this year. Catchers get banged up regularly, so lots of teams will probably need a temporary backup catcher while their guy heals up.
A team can’t send him down without passing him through waivers, I think.
Unless Bart improves his defense, he’ll probably not beat out the other catchers, so he’ll be put on waivers. Maybe he passes through waivers and can stay with one team, but I see him being passed around a bit. A lot of teams might want to roll the dice on him given his former prospect status
I thought about the Rays, but they seem to really like Pinto and Rortvedt is out of options, so not sure they’d jump at adding another out-of-options guy in Bart and send down Pinto, when Rortvedt is presumably still learning the pitching staff.
When I read “real payroll” i figured you would be using how much the team is actually paying players, factoring in deferrals etc. But that does not seem to be the case – looking at the Dodgers it appears taht you are using 70 million for Ohtani’s salary this year, rather than the real amount they are paying him – 2 million.
Nothing like rooting for a team that wins its first playoff series in years, only to cut their payroll by 20% the next year….sigh.
I wonder how many teams claimed they would increase spending significantly, only (like the Cardinals) to increase it nominally or reduce budgets?
The Cardinals never said “significantly.” They kept to their word by increasing payroll, adding 3 starting pitchers, and improving the bullpen.
FYI: the Consumer Price Index, the inflation rate from February of 2023 to February of 2024: 3.15%. Since February 2020: 20%.
(This post is not political. It is provided to help people understand the value of a dollar compared to the previous year, thus allowing them to make more accurate comparisons about annual payroll changes.)
Now let’s not spread false information. You do not have to buy a ticket to access the parking lot. I went to the parking lot boycott, and entered the game very late so as to not be turnstiled. In my (well practiced) view, 13K was certainly in the “ballpark” so to speak of actual bodies in seats. During the 2nd inning there were still several thousand boycotters in the party atmosphere that was the parking lot–mariachi bands, free food and sell banner giveaways, a dispensary, a circus bag-toss at effigies of notorious A’s execs.
As to future attendance, it will get very bad with consecutive home stands of Nationals, Pirates, Cards and Marlins. Interleague draws poorly and none of these teams have much of a national following. So A’s may set a record for sure.
Unless I’m reading it wrong, the Mariners were no. 6 in attendance. The numbers you cite still work, but the Diamondbacks, Reds, Mets, Orioles, White Sox, Royals and Rays are all between them and the Marlins. And the attendance in Seoul counts for the “home” games of the Padres and Dodgers, which is slightly misleading, I’d say.
Jon is referring to average attendance per game. It looks like you’re looking at total attendance which would be uneven as not all stadiums have hosted the same number of games.