{"id":6060,"date":"2013-03-05T08:43:56","date_gmt":"2013-03-05T13:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=6060"},"modified":"2013-03-05T09:48:29","modified_gmt":"2013-03-05T14:48:29","slug":"mike-trouts-2013-salary-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=6060","title":{"rendered":"Mike Trout’s 2013 Salary Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Trout curiously penny-pinched by his team in salary assignment. Photo wiki\/flickr Keith Allison<\/p><\/div>\n

The Los Angeles Angels could have “assigned” any salary they wanted to Mike Trout<\/strong>, per the guidelines set forth by the CBA for pre-arbitration MLB players. \u00a0They chose to give Trout a nominal raise ($20k), paying him barely more than the MLB minimum for 2013.<\/p>\n

Trout, to his credit, has taken the high road<\/a>. \u00a0 \u00a0Trout’s agent Craig Landis<\/strong> has not<\/a>, ripping the team for the move, which resulted at the end of a “negotiation” whereby the Angels basically told Landis they were done talking and summarily “assigned” a salary for 2013.<\/p>\n

Were the Angels entirely within their right to do this? \u00a0Yes.<\/p>\n

Is $510,000 an amazing amount of money regardless? \u00a0You bet.<\/p>\n

Does this number have any effect on the 9-figure salary Trout will eventually merit? \u00a0Not in the least.<\/p>\n

Did the Angels needlessly look to save a few thousand dollars with the ONE guy on the team who they shouldn’t have low-balled after his historic 2012 season? \u00a0Absolutely<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

There’s ample precident for teams to pay pre-arb guys more than they need to in order to show good faith. \u00a0Just a couple of recent examples: Craig Kimbrel<\/strong> went from $419k to $590k after winning the Rookie of the Year in 2011. \u00a0Tim Lincecum<\/strong> went from $405k to $650k after winning the Cy Young. \u00a0 Grant Brisbee<\/strong> posted a few more 1st-2nd year salary jumps<\/a> for the last 10 years of Rookie-of-the-Year award winners to further illustrate the point; Trout has the 2nd lowest raise by any of the last 10 RoY winners (unsurprisingly, the penurious Marlins gave Chris Coughlan<\/strong> a lower raise after he won). \u00a0What Trout did was arguably more impressive than what either Kimbrel or Lincecum did; he unanimously won the Rookie of the Year and came in 2nd in MVP voting (a disputed MVP vote since Trout’s season from a statistical basis was one of the best in the history of the game).<\/p>\n

Why antagonize your best player, your most important guy going forward, in order to save $100k?? \u00a0 This is the same team that is going to pay Vernon Wells<\/strong> $24.643 Million to be their 4th outfielder. \u00a0Jeff Miller<\/strong>, columnist for the Orange County Register, put it better than I could online<\/a>; every one of his points is valid.<\/p>\n

I just hope the Nationals never stoop to this sort of behavior just to save a few thousand dollars on a team worth hundreds of millions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Los Angeles Angels could have “assigned” any salary they wanted to Mike Trout, per the guidelines set forth by the CBA for pre-arbitration MLB players. \u00a0They chose to give Trout a nominal raise ($20k), paying him barely more than the MLB minimum for 2013. Trout, to his credit, has taken the high road. \u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[490,961,1562,1563,1561,456,316,547],"class_list":["post-6060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonnatsbaseball","tag-chris-coughlan","tag-craig-kimbrel","tag-craig-landis","tag-grant-brisbee","tag-jeff-miller","tag-mike-trout","tag-tim-lincecum","tag-vernon-wells"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6060"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6065,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6060\/revisions\/6065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}