Where Teams Spend Money, and Where They Don’t

In my post yesterday, I broke down the starters at every position and determined an average salary for all the positions in Major League Baseball. Several comments noted the large amount of minimum-salaried players at several positions and indicated that could be skewing the results. I had indicated that teams appeared to value starting pitching and power hitting over the prime defensive positions. However, it is possible that minimum salaries are weighing the average down, and that the free agent market actually values the differing positions similarly.

As a result, I have dug a bit deeper and separated the salaries into three categories. The first category is players who are making the major league minimum. These are players who have not reached arbitration or signed a contract extension increasing their salary. The second group of players contains arbitration eligible players. This group of players all have less than six years of service time. The group also includes the relatively small number of players who are not yet arbitration eligible, but signed a contract extension prior to arbitration eligibility increasing their salary from the minimum. The third group of player is those with more than six years of service time. These players all signed contracts as free agents or agreed to an extension prior to free agency that bought out free agent years.

In dealing with top starters yesterday, I used the highest salaried starter for each team. For today’s post, I made a modification. The top starter for this post is the starter with highest WAR in the FanGraphs Depth Charts. Yesterday, the top starting pitchers averaged a salary of roughly $15 million. For today, that number drops to $10 million, which would still have put the top starter as one of the top two position groups from yesterday. There are 11 positions total, with the eight position players, one starting pitcher, a designated hitter for American League teams, and a closer. Of those 315 starters, here is how the starters broke down by service class:

Around one quarter of all the Opening Day starters will be making the MLB minimum salary this season of $507,500, or perhaps slightly more depending on the generosity of the teams. The average salary at each position would provide little information, but here is a graph showing how many players are making the minimum by position.

Matt Adams is the lone first baseman making the MLB minimum salary. A bulk of the players come from the traditional up the middle defensive positions. Shortstop, catcher, second base, and center field total 44 of the 79 players making the minimum. Teams could simply be going cheap at these positions, but defensive peak tends to be younger than for offensive numbers and catchers have shorter careers. Given that defense does not pay as well, these numbers could be representative of teams maximizing their resources.

Roughly one-third of players expected to start this season are arbitration eligible. They do not make free agent money, but they do haul in about ten times the amount of players who have yet to reach their status. Here is a graph showing the average salary by position for starters who are arbitration-eligible. This includes players who have less than six years of service time, but have signed a contract extension with their respective team.

It pays to be a pitcher in arbitration. The pitchers above only include the best projected pitcher on the team, so we have self-selected the cream of the crop. Even so, the salaries pitchers, including closers, receive in arbitration seems to move higher than that of position players. There is not much separation between the rest of the positions as the arbitration process clamps down on escalating salaries.

In free agency, salaries are not artificially reduced, and that is easily seen in the numbers below. For reference, here is the chart from yesterday, showing the average salary by position.

On average, salaries favored starting pitchers and the power positions. Running the numbers with just veterans with more than six years of service time, we can see if the same holds true in free agency. Here are the numbers for free agent starters.

Much of what was true for yesterday’s post, holds true in this analysis. There is a bit of an evening out, but aces and first basemen still hold a large lead in terms of salary compared to the rest of the positions. Closers do not make a lot of money in free agency, and the salary is kept down by some teams taking cheaper relievers and making them the closer. Catchers and second basemen still fare poorly in free agency, even with Robinson Cano‘s big deal. Shortstop and third basemen move up a little while right field takes a hit as some teams try to stick their bargain free agent out there. As I mentioned yesterday, Jason Heyward and Justin Upton could change the calculus in right field as will Giancarlo Stanton’s deal once he gets older and the price gets higher.

While the power hitting positions do not get extremely well-compensated in arbitration, and comparing just free agent numbers evens out the distribution a little, the aces and first basemen still receive the most money. More than half of the league’s starters is made up of players who have yet to achieves six years of service in the majors. For the rest, it is much better to be a top starting pitcher or a power-hitting first baseman when it comes to cashing in on talent.