M’s final 2005 payroll: $71m
DMZ · January 8, 2006 at 9:47 pm · Filed Under Mariners
The AP’s story is all over the place. The “commisioner’s numbers” are out — they include salaries and pro-rated signing bonuses, along with players on the DL. It’s a useful baseline because while many teams announce and count their payrolls differently, and they wall want to appear at their best locally, any uniform accounting means we can make comparisons. There are some issues with the way MLB does this, but really, any method used seems to manage to distort something, so we roll with it.
Seattle was 14th, with $70,513,167. That’s a little behind the World Champion White Sox ($73m) and ahead of Detroit ($69m).
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Seems about a Millwood less than they publicly claim.
Of course, this is pre-arbitration. There are still a few contracts to work out, but yes, this seems lower than what most fans expect payroll to be.
Doesn’t it usually work out to be in the mid-high 80’s?
According to the story, the “figures include salaries and pro-rated shares of signing bonuses for players on Aug. 31 rosters and disabled lists.” Based on that language, it appears that the payroll numbers do not include the salaries of players whom a team traded or released earlier in the year, even if the team continued to pay all or part of those players’ salaries. Thus, the M’s $70.5 million figure apparently does not include any part of the salaries for Boone ($9 million), Winn ($3.75 million), Spiezio ($3.1 million), or Villone ($1.7 million). If you add those salaries, the payroll jumps to about $88 million (perhaps a little more depending on how the commissioner’s office classified Wiki Gonzalez, who was no longer on the 40-man roster but still with the team on August 31, 2005).
My first thought when I saw this was the M’s penchant for treating each year discretely (unlike, say, Toronto, which has multi-year payroll targets). But then, of course, Grizz is right. This isn’t all the money the team spent on players.
What were the AP numbers as of last year?
I’ll ask it once again. In 1998, we tried to get by on $54 million with players like GlenAllen Hill. (Combined with Joey Cora and Russ Davis, this gave us the three worst fielders at their respective positions.) That didn’t work, so we decided to not be quite so cheap, spend a little bit more, and the result was 2000-2001 with consecutive ALCS appearances. Now, 7-8 years later, we’re all the way up to…$71 million? Chicago did well with about the same amount, etc. etc., which is another issue. But I can’t see that Millwood would have broken our bank.
And once again, I’ll counter by pointing to the successful, lower payroll clubs, like Oakland.
Spending more shouldn’t be the goal.
The opening day payroll from USA Today and other press sources was $88m.