Can the St. Louis Cardinals afford Jason Heyward?

You may have heard that Jason Heyward, one of the best position players in baseball, is a free agent and that the St. Louis Cardinals have interest in signing him. Entering his age-26 season, Heyward is poised for a large payday—perhaps in the $180- to $200-million range. Setting aside the question of whether the Cardinals should sign Heyward (a question VEB writers have delved into previously this young offseason), I thought it might do us well to look at whether the Cardinals can afford to sign Heyward.

Last week, we compared the Cardinals' 2015 payroll to their current 2016 payroll commitments after players became free agents. We're going to take a longer view today, at the Cardinals' payroll obligations from 2016 through 2021. Naturally, for this exercise, I've use the information freely available at the indispensable Cot's Baseball Contracts, which is now under the Baseball Prospectus umbrella.

It helps me to have a visual of this information, so I made a chart. On it, a red box signifies a team option for a given year. A purpose box indicates a joint option. There are no blue boxes because the Cards do not currently have a player under contract who has a player option for a future season.

Cardinals' Payroll Obligations:  2016-2012

Options vs. Buyouts

I've included the amount of the Cardinals' buyout of these options on the chart because that is the most that the club is obligated to pay. Obviously, if St. Louis exercises one of these options, their payroll obligations will increase. Here is the amount for each option:

• Matt Carpenter, 2020:  $18.5 million ($2 million buyout)
• Yadier Molina, 2018:  $15 million ($2 million buyout)
• Matt Holliday, 2017:  $17 million ($1 million buyout)
• Jaime Garcia, 2017:  $12 million ($500,000 buyout)
• Jordan Walden, 2017:  $5.25 million ($250,000 buyout)

League Minimum and Arbitration Eligible

This can get a bit tricky to calculate. Players like Tony Cruz and Bourjos are pretty easy to project. The same goes for Rosenthal, Maness, and Adams. But the lesser the MLB service time, the more difficult it is to project exactly what a player will be making. I imagine that Martinez, Wacha, Wong, and Siegrist will be big-leaguers throughout the entirety of the next four seasons and hit their projected arbitration-eligible seasons, but they could conceivably get sent down and push those projections back. The same goes for Randal Grichuk and Stephen Piscotty.

Nonetheless, you can see where the homegrown players—so cheap up to this point in their careers—will start to get more and more expensive. The window between 2018 and 2020 is where a bulge in payroll will be felt from their guaranteed increases in wages under the collective bargaining agreement. It's also plausible that one or two of them may sign an extension with the Cardinals, which might accelerate their pay increases.

Overall

The Cardinals will have a larger payroll in the years to come than what I'm going to put on this graph. This represents the guaranteed payroll. The league-minimum earners are not included. Neither are the arbitration-eligible players. Both will drive up costs in each year above what is shown. That being said, the salaries that the Cardinals must pay under guaranteed contracts are shown and they form the payroll foundation, so to speak.

The Cardinals have a fair amount of guaranteed payroll for 2016 and 2017. But after that, the club's payroll obligations go down and quickly. In 2019, the only guaranteed salary on the books is Carpenter's. His option is the only money that the Cardinals must pay out in 2020. The Cardinals have no guaranteed salary obligations in 2021.

The Cardinals have the future payroll flexibility to sign Heyward.