{"id":15382,"date":"2018-09-26T10:53:25","date_gmt":"2018-09-26T14:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=15382"},"modified":"2018-09-26T21:31:40","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T01:31:40","slug":"post-2018-season-payroll-analysis-how-much-will-we-have-to-spend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=15382","title":{"rendered":"Post-2018 Season Payroll Analysis; how much will we have to spend?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Hope<\/a>

Hope that Wieters contract was worth it; its the reason we’re over the cap 2x years running. Photo via District On Deck<\/p><\/div>\n

Note!<\/strong> thanks to Wally for pointing out I had Strasburg and Scherzer Luxury tax figures wrong.\u00a0 I’ve updated the tables and the calculations… it made a significant difference.<\/p>\n

Inspired by this series<\/a> from\u00a0John Sickels<\/strong> at minorleagueball.com, here’s\u00a0a first pass related to what this team may do this coming off-season.<\/p>\n

In order to know what we need to do, we kinda need to know how much money we have to play with.<\/p>\n

In 2018, despite a sell-off of salaries at the trade deadline and into August (which resulted in\u00a0roughly\u00a0$8M in payroll saved for this year), the team wasn’t able to stay under the luxury tax for the season.\u00a0 2018’s luxury tax payroll figure was $197M<\/a>, and at the end of all the machinations … we were still several million over.<\/p>\n

Cots tries to do the ridiculous payroll accounting to figure out how much over or under a team is on payroll; their Nats 2018 calcs are here<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0The key point of looking this up is this: the annual payroll figure is not just about player salaries; it has to include Player Benefits too.\u00a0 So 2018’s Benefit figure was roughly $14M and 2019’s will be $14.5M.\u00a0 So we have to remember to take this figure back later on when figuring out how much money the team has to spend…<\/p>\n

Here’s the list of FAs coming off the 40-man from this year (if they havn’t already done so) and their 2018 salary:<\/p>\n