If we’re being honest, I don’t like to spend a whole ton of time worrying about the Pirates’ payroll. There is, quite simply, nothing I can do about it. The front office has to accept the number ownership gives them and put the best team they can on the field with it, and I’m more interested in how they work around the payroll as a constraint than I am in why the payroll isn’t higher. This isn’t me trying to preach to you about what you should or should care about as a Pirate fan, just me laying my own position out.
Despite that, it’s pretty impossible to sort through the upcoming Russell Martin saga without spending some serious time in the weeds with the Pirates’ payrolls. Simply put, before you answer the question of whether the Pirates should pay Russell Martin, you’ve got to answer the question of whether or not they can. Now, this is tricky territory for a number of reasons. First, it’s not obvious to anyone just how much the Pirates really can spend based on their team’s income. Second, no one’s really sure how much extra money teams are getting every year from MLB’s new national TV contract that started this year. There are a few things we do know: we know what the Pirates spend on their payroll ever year, we know how much the Pirates said they were willing to spend last winter, and we know the Rockies said they were planning on receiving about $19 million in TV money last winter (Hat-tip here to David Todd and Matt Bandi, who were discussing Martin and the Bucs’ payroll on Twitter over the weekend; it was their discussion that reminded me of the story about the Rockies and their TV money from last winter). We’ll take that Rockies’ number at close to face value, since their Opening Day payroll went up by almost exactly that much from 2013 to 2014.
That $19 million is actually relatively close to what the Pirates were seemingly willing to spend last winter, if you add together what they paid Edinson Volquez ($5 million) and Clint Barmes ($2 million) with their highest reported offer to AJ Burnett (~$12 million), though the Opening Day payroll only ended up being about $5 million higher than last year’s, as Barmes’s salary was a pay cut from 2013. Still, the Pirates were pretty clearly willing to spend more than they did last winter (besides the offer to Burnett, they pursued James Loney and Josh Johnson, who would’ve cost a combined $15 million or so to sign). Let’s be conservative for a moment and we say that the $12 million they offered to Burnett was 100% of what they were willing to spend. Close to $3.5 million of that money went to Ike Davis, who the Pirates traded for in April, so what we can say that we know for certain is this: the Pirates spent at least $8.5 million less on their 2014 team payroll than they were capable of spending. I don’t view this as a crime in itself; we’ve known for a while that this off-season was going to be important, and the Pirates have some rising arbitration costs to deal with (which we’ll hit in a second). They seemed to be willing to sign Burnett or trade for a pricey pitcher at the deadline, the reality was simply that they didn’t.
The money the Pirates’ didn’t spend last year would’ve put their theoretical payroll at ~$84 million, about $18 million higher than the $66 million that they spent in 2013. Knowing what we know about the Rockies TV money, that means that the extra money the Pirates were willing to spend this year was probably all TV money. They very likely have more money to spend than this, because attendance/merchandising/general interest in the team has been driven way, way up by the back-to-back playoff runs. According to that same Rockies’ article, there is also likely a bigger TV payroll coming this winter than last winter, as some money was held back for MLB’s central fund. If we give them an extra $10 million to spend from the TV money, we’re up to $94 million. I have no idea how much extra money to allot to their payroll from the increased revenue, but I can tell you that the Brewers’ payroll since 2009 tends to hover between $80 and $100 million and the Reds’ payroll topped out at $114 million in 2014. The Brewers draw better than the Pirates do, and the Reds have, at least recently, drawn just about the same. Of course, every year pre-2014 was centered around the old TV deal, so we have to adjust for that. I guess what I’ll say is this: it seems like a relatively decent guess to peg the Pirates’ theoretical payroll ceiling at $100 million, at least for now, though putting it that high seems a bit wild to me given that their Opening Day payroll in 2014 was $71 million.
In 2015, the Pirates have $23 million committed to three players (Andrew McCutchen, Charlie Morton, and Starling Marte) on their active roster and Jose Tabata via signed contracts. If we use MLB Trade Rumors’ arbitration calculator, we get $40.3 million spread out over Gaby Sanchez, Neil Walker, Ike Davis, Mark Melancon, Travis Snider, Chris Stewart, Pedro Alvarez, Tony Watson, Josh Harrison, Jared Hughes, and Vance Worley. It seems unlikely to me that all of those players will be back (I’m looking at Sanchez and Davis here) or that Mark Melancon will jump all the way to $7.6 million, but the payroll is now up to $63 million spread over 14 players. If the rest of the roster was filled with pre-arbitration guys, that puts the 25-man roster at about $68 million. Let’s leave it there, assuming that a Clint Barmes-like guy or two are signed for big league depth and that will replace the salary of whoever ends up not playing first base and the money that Melancon doesn’t make
So we’re at $68 million, with a ceiling of somewhere between $84 (what the Pirates could have spend last year) and $100 million (what I’m guessing the Pirates could spend) with $8 million in reserve from last year’s underspending. Put in simpler terms, the Pirates could probably afford for both Russell Martin and Francisco Liriano to accept $15 million qualifying offers and probably be OK, though they couldn’t add much else to the team. That might be OK, depending on how Gerrit Cole develops and Jameson Taillon and Charlie Morton rehab, but honestly, just adding one starting pitcher feels like it’s leaving the club short-staffed a bit. I guess if we trim a bit more money from the utility players by doing things like trading for Justin Sellers, we could bump that pre-free agency value down to $60-$65 million, and that would leave money for Martin and two starting pitchers, which is probably what the team needs to be real pre-season contenders.
I’m actually not all that concerned with 2015, though. Martin will be worth $15 million next year and the Pirates could afford to pay him $15 million next year and that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. In 2016, though, the Pirates’ guaranteed money to McCutchen, Morton, Marte, and Tabata raises to $29 million, and out of that pool of arbitration players they only lose Gaby Sanchez while gaining Jordy Mercer, Jeff Locke, and others. They could find their arbitration obligations next winter approaching something like $50 million, which means that if the club signs Martin for $15 million a year, they could be at almost $95 million in payroll without considering whatever pitcher it is that they sign this winter (be it Liriano or someone else) or what their off-season needs next winter are. It gets tougher to predict beyond that, but in the 2016-2017 winter Neil Walker hits free agency and will either need paid or replaced, arbitration costs for guys like Harrison, Mercer, and Alvarez will continue to go up, and Gerrit Cole will hit arbitration. It doesn’t get easier from here, is my basic point.
Now, at the bottom of this I’ll add my caveat that of course I’m rounding and doing back-of-the-envelope-math and basically straight-out fudging numbers that I’m not 100% sure of, because that’s sort of the nature of the game once you get deep into the woods with closed team books and hypothetical future arbitration numbers and so on and so forth (this is partly why I don’t like spending at on of time on this). I think I’m generally in the right ballpark here, though, and if I am, this illustrates by big concern with signing Martin to a long-term deal worth eight-figures a season. It’s not that the Pirates can’t afford it, because they can (especially in the short-term) and it’s not even necessarily that Martin won’t be worth it, it’s that paying that much money to one player has the potential to seriously hamper their off-season flexibility down the road as the service time odometers click upwards on their most important young players.
If the Pirates agree to pay Martin $60 million over the next four years this winter and Starling Marte, Gerrit Cole, Jameson Taillon, and Gregory Polanco all hit their projection ceilings, well, then that’s fine. The Pirates will be a juggernaut, and they’ll contend for the World Series every year from now until at least 2018 and maybe beyond if that happens. My concern, though, is this: what if they pay Martin that money and one or more of those guys don’t pan out? How do they address that? Is that money best used on Martin, or would it best be used on starting pitching in 2016 after Cole and Taillon both disappoint over the next two years? I don’t have an answer to that question today, because I don’t think the answer is obvious today. Signing Martin to a big long-term deal this winter essentially says that the answer is obvious. Maybe it is, but this sort of hypothetical is what makes me the most nervous when talking about re-signing Martin.
