Preamble – apologies for the incredibly long post, but I think going through the fine details is the only way to do this. Maybe this should be its own thread, but it seemed to fit some of the discussion being had here.
There has been a lot of discussion lately around the remaining budget with various numbers for the current payroll being thrown around, so I thought this might be a good time to do a deep dive into tracking the payroll. This is something I have done personally for a while, typically using Cot’s as my main resource, but I have seen a lot of references to the Red Sox Payroll twitter account which I was unfamiliar with. I went through the payroll spreadsheets for four sources (Fangraphs, Spotrac, Cot’s, and RSP twitter) to look at where they were different and try to come up with the most accurate accounting.
TLDR version – The Red Sox Payroll twitter account is the best resource with both results and methodology considered. It may be slightly conservative on the incentives/bonuses, but only by a few million dollars at most and I would need to spend some time looking at specific incentive clauses in contracts to determine how likely they are to vest.
The four sites group the money into 7 categories, with Cot’s and RSP each having a unique extra category. The categories are: Guaranteed contracts, Arb players, Pre-arb players, Players no longer on team, Benefits/medical expenses, 40 man roster minor league players, Pre-arb bonus pool. Cot’s has a separate line item for IL time since an additional ML minimum player will be added even though the injured player is getting paid as well. RSP has a unique line item for incentives and bonuses that players may hit during the year.
Guaranteed Contracts
- Devers – 10 year $313.5M with deferred money. Without knowing the exact details in the contract I don’t think this an AAV we can calculate on our own, but all 4 sites have it as an AAV between $29.0M and $29.15M. I will put this down at $29.1M
- Story – 6 year $140M. There is some club option and player opt out language but nothing that really affects the AAV. All four sites agree at an AAV of $23.33M
- Giolito – 2 year $38.5M with a player opt out after the first year. All four sites agree at an AAV of $19.25M
- Yoshida – 5 year $90M. All four sites agree at an AAV of $18M
- Jansen – 2 year $32M. All four sites agree at an AAV of $16M
- Martin – 2 year $17.5M. This one is confusing since two of the sites have an AAV of $8.75M and 2 sites have it at $7.5M. The only unique thing I can find about his contract is a $4M signing bonus which I don’t think affects the AAV, so I am going with the straight math - $8.75M
- Whitlock – 4 year $18.75M. All four sites agree at an AAV of $4.688M
- Refsnyder – 1 year $1.85M with a club option and 150k buyout. The sites are split on whether this is an AAV of $1.85M or $2M, but I believe the buyout is counted as guaranteed money so I am going with $2M
- Criswell – 1 year $1M. This was a major league contract but he has options remaining. Even if he spends the entire year in the minors I believe he still counts against the major league payroll. Spotrac, Cot’s and I think Fangraphs all count him while RSP lists Criswell and his contract but does not have a number included for him in the spreadsheet. This seems to just be a mistaken omission from RSP - $1M
Total AAV on guaranteed contracts – $122.1M
Fangraphs Total - $120.87M
Spotrac Total - $120.92M
Cot’s Total - $120.87M
RSP - $120.86M
Arb players
The team settled with all four arb eligible players yesterday.
- Pivetta - $7.5M
- O’Neill - $5.85M
- McGuire - $1.5M
- Schreiber - $1.175M
Total AAV on arb contracts - $16.0M
Pre-arb players
We can quibble over exactly who makes the team, but 12 guaranteed contracts (including arb eligible players, excluding Criswell) leaves 14 spots to be filled by pre-arb players. Major league minimum this year is $740k but there is typically some small bumps for players with more service time so I did a flat $0.75M per spot.
Total AAV for pre-arb players - $10.5M
There is a large variation in this number across the four sites, so I dug into each of their methodologies.
Fangraphs Total - $15.06M. Fangraphs has a footnote spelling out where this number comes from - “factoring in IL time, each time will need to pay for at least 33 player seasons over the course of the regular season. This number is calculated by subtracting the number of guaranteed and arbitration year contracts from 33 … and then multiplying the number that remains … by the league minimum salary.” See the discussion below on IL time for research into the 33 number.
Spotrac Total - $10.01M. Spotrac does not seem to account for IL time in their total.
Cot’s Total – $14.9M. Cot’s looks to be accounting for 13 pre-arb players as well as a unique line item for an additional 7 pre-arb players to cover IL time, each at $0.745M.
RSP - $7.94M. RSP only lists a number for 10 pre-arb players (which does not even fill the 26 man roster), but they have a much higher number ($12M) for the 40 man roster minor league salaries. The other 3 sites have the 40 man mL salaries as follows:
Fangraphs - $2.5M
Spotrac - $2.25M
Cot’s - $2.25M
In order to compare apples to apples, I combined the pre-arb salaries, 40 man minor league salaries, and IL time salaries into one number for all of the sites. This reduced the variance between sites significantly, with the totals below:
Fangraphs - $17.56M
Spotrac - $12.26M
Cot’s - $17.15M
RSP – $19.94M
Spotrac is the obviously deficient one here by both result and methodology. The other 3 all end up fairly close, with exactly how much IL time to account for being the difference. I attempted a little research into the 33 player seasons quoted by Fangraphs, but I was only able to find one source for total IL time by team. Ironically enough Spotrac has an IL tracker that you can sort to cumulative team stats and over the 2021-2023 period the average team had a combined 1528 days of IL time per season, or the equivalent of 9.43 player seasons. On top of the 26 man roster, that equates to a total of 35.43 player seasons required to finish the regular season, and that is just the average. I have no idea how MLB teams account for this variance, but at the very least I think we should cover the average.
(35.43 player seasons – 26 roster spots)*($0.74M) = $6.98M AAV for IL time
Added to the $10.5M for the pre-arb 26 man roster spots and $2.25M for minor league salaries results in:
Total AAV for Pre-arb, IL and mL salaries = $19.73M
Benefits
Fangraphs, Spotrac and Cot’s are all at $17M for this, RSP has it at $16.5M. I will use the higher number -
$17M AAV
Pre-arb Bonus Pool
I believe this is mandated by the CBA and all four sites agree at an
AAV of $1.67M
Players no longer on the team
- Chris Sale – Spotrac, Cot’s, and RSP all agree that the AAV hit from the Sale trade is $17.0M. Fangraphs divides the money owed to Sale, Hosmer and Turner into odd groupings, but ultimately agrees that Sale counts as a $17.0M AAV for 2024. However, they also include $1.5M that they claim is from re-calculating the AAV after the trade. I do not believe this makes any sense since Atlanta now owns Sale’s contract, so any AAV recalculation would go on their books. In any case, that contract has since been torn up and replaced with a new contract so I do not believe it would still apply anyway. I am going to ignore the $1.5M, and go with an AAV of $17M
- Eric Hosmer – The same three sites all agree that Hosmer counts as a $0.74M hit (major league minimum), while Fangraphs has Hosmer at an AAV of $15.375M with San Diego paying $12.885M of that ($2.49M left over on the Sox budget). I honestly cannot figure out how they get to the 15.375 number. The original deal was $144M over 8 years, for an AAV of 18. However it was frontloaded with the first five years at $21M and the last 3 years at $13M. Since Hosmer was traded during the current CBA, his AAV has to be recalculated based his remaining contract at the time of the trade. What I don’t know is whether the salary for the year in which his traded is included in that, only partially, or not at all. If you include the whole 2022 salary, then you get a 4 year contract for $60M ($15M AAV). If you include only the remaining full years, it is a 3 year contract for $39M ($13M AAV). If the 2022 remaining contract is prorated based on how many games were left in the season, it would fall somewhere in between those two numbers. But none of those matches the $15.375M AAV listed by Fangraphs. In any case, I have spent way to much time researching and discussing Eric Fucking Hosmer so I am going to say that Fangraphs is wrong here and the other three are right - $0.74M AAV
- Justin Turner – Perhaps the most convoluted of the contracts to figure out, but I was saved by Speier. Fangraphs and RSP include an 2024 AAV hit of $4.15M for Turner do to the weirdness of his player option, but Spotrac and Cot’s do not include anything for him. Luckily I was able to dig up an old Globe article by Speier where he explicitly laid out that Turner would count as a $4.15M hit against the 2024 budget if he opted out. I trust Speier more than anyone to investigate stuff like this - $4.15M AAV
Total AAV for players no longer on team - $21.89M
Incentives and Bonuses
Red Sox Payroll twitter is the only one to include something for this – they list $5M to cover future bonuses and incentives that players may hit throughout the season. It does make sense to try to account for this, but I do not know how teams would approach this. I think it is overly conservative to consider that all incentives will be met, and without going through the incentives for each contract I have no idea if the $5M figure is the max amount or something less than that. I think I will calculate the total without anything here and this would need to be accounted for when considering how much headroom to leave under the limit.
Total 2024 AAV
The table below shows the totals for each of the four sources along with the total of my conclusions above.
Fangraphs actually comes out almost exactly the same as my numbers above, but their methodology around Hosmer and Sale is suspect. Spotrac leaves out money for Turner and to cover IL time and therefore comes out significantly lower than the others. Cot’s also leaves out Turner. RSP has everything nearly the same as me but does leave out Criswell and includes money for bonuses. I would say that I am pretty confident the Red Sox have somewhere between $35-40M left before they would hit the first threshold. I don’t know what there actual limit is going to be, but I hope they spend some of it, and soon.