FanPost

Cardinals Future Payroll - 2019 and Beyond, Opening Day Edition

Greetings all, and welcome to the third edition of my throwback to a former staple of VEB: Craig Edwards' fantastic payroll tracker. If you're interested, you can peruse the previous edition.

The main changes to this version are the additions of the Miller and Wieters contracts, as well as the Goldschmidt extension. There's also a bit of finagling with arbitration/team control money, the addition of certain players' incentives to the overall payroll calculation, and contracts being displayed with signing bonuses in mind; that is, the matrix now accounts for signing bonuses that are spread out over multiple years. While this doesn't really affect the calculus, it does help show a more detailed contractual breakdown, in my opinion.

My sources are the usual suspects: MLB Trade Rumors, Spotrac, B-Ref, and Baseball Prospectus, with a few other sources to fill in some minor gaps. I'm not going to link to them in the post this time around (I'm lazy, I know), but feel free to ask for them if you're interested.

You'll find my usual notes and caveats near the end of the post, following the matrix.

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Here's a link to the tracker as well, just in case it doesn't play nicely with VEB this time around and is hard to read.

  • Wieters and Peña aren't included in the "Guaranteed" section for 2019, but are tracked in the total for 2019. This was done for various reasons; namely, the uncertainty surrounding their contract status until very recently.
  • For this exercise, I am assuming Mikolas receives all $2 million in incentives over the life of his contract, and am assuming it at a rate of $0.5 million a year from 2020-2023.
  • The extra $1 million for Goldschmidt for 2019 is a 'trade assignment bonus', granted upon his trade to the Cardinals.
  • Again, I don't expect the league minimums to be quite as high for 2020/2021 as I have them, so the team control money will likely decrease some for those years.
  • For calculation purposes, I'm assuming every player listed as 'team control' receives the full league minimum. This will not be the case, as several players will only earn a prorated salary, so the real-life totals will likely be smaller.
  • I did not account for every player's incentives in my calculations - really just Mikolas and Wainwright - as that likely would have ended up being very messy, confusing, and probably more inaccurate as well. If you'd like to know more about a specific players' incentives or contract status, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.
  • I'll state my usual disclaimer that I'm no expert at this stuff and am just doing it as a sort of pet project in my free time, so if you see that anything is wrong or could be improved upon, please, let me know. I do try my best to ensure accuracy, but I'm not perfect and welcome constructive criticism/tips!
That just about does it for this time around. I'm not sure when the next version will come out; it'll either be after the trade deadline or shortly after the season, I haven't decided yet. I'm open to suggestions, though.

Thanks for reading!