Diamondbacks 2019 Payroll Update

Mike Hazen was charged by Ken Kendrick and the rest of ownership to cut payroll, don’t mortgage the future in any way, AND get better all at the same time. The first two charges have have been successfully navigated. The third is still TBD with the team at .500 56-57 and 3.5 Games out of the Wild Card.

On March 27 we estimated opening day Payroll to be about 123M and year end projected payroll to be approximately 128M. Of course without knowing what moves they might make at the trade deadline that was mostly based on injury replacements/callups during the season adding a few million, as it always does.

After going player by player and being as detailed as possible I come up with Approximately 124M projected year end payroll for 2019. (Last year they ended up about 141 M) Note, this does not include other player expenses, such as insurances and benefits.

It may seem odd at first glance to think that after trading Zack Greinke and off loading his salary the difference for 2019 is not all that great from the pre season estimate. However keep in mind several things:

1.) According to Cot’s info, the DBacks had to absorb the 2M assignment bonus Zack got for being traded. That eats into the 2019 Salary savings. The savings are more significant for 2020-21, Over 20M total.

2.) Adding Blake Swihart to the roster added almost 800K in pro rated salary

3.) Greg Holland has met or will meet over 500K in IP and Games Finished bonuses I did not not account for in the initial spread sheet March 27th.

Below the spread sheet I have copied some notes from Cot’s Baseball Contracts page

Other resources drawn upon were Baseball-Reference and Roster Resource . My numbers are a little different, but I’m confident they are more accurate because I am only focused on one team and went player by player pre and post trade deadline. I also tried to dial in the call ups and figure out an estimate for MLB service time so their salary numbers are going to be within 50-100K of actual per player. If there are any specific player questions about how I calculated, please ask me in the comments section

EDIT: A couple of roster moves this week, but no material difference to the bottom line payroll.

Greinke Note: DBacks will pay Houston/Greinke 26 Million

$2M assignment bonus on 11/1/19,

$3,333,334 on 10/15/19

$10,333,333 each on 7/1/2020 and 7/1/2021

Previous deferred money has already been paid into Anuity accounts.

Mike Leake Note: Seattle pays Arizona $18,982,258, including

$4,982,258 on 9/1/19,

$9M in 2020 (paid in four installments of $2.5M each on 4/15, 6/1, 7/15 and 9/1)

$5M buyout 1/15/21

Looking forward to 2020

The total to Greinke, Tomas, and the four guaranteed contracts for Escobar, Marte, Kelly and Leake comes out to 47.5 M

Arbitration Estimates for all 11 Arb players comes out 49.5 M.

Full and part time MLB Pre Arb players are estimated at 6.64 M

The total comes out to 104M, and if options for Bloth Flores and McFarland are picked up it comes out to 112 M

There are still several full time roster spots to fill in under this scenario, roughly four for opening day, two if Flores and T.J. are retained.

In a recent article by Nick Piecoro, Mike Hazen said he would save about 20M each of the next two years from the Greinke Contract. I can’t quite figure out exactly how to reconcile that number, but of course he knows better than I . That said, going player by player, and simply plugging in the reported numbers that Arizona needs to send to Houston, as I did below and then factoring in increased ARB costs, the 104M total figure does give them about 20M to work with next year and keep payroll roughly where it’s at now. So in a sense it adds up.

Hazen was also quoted as saying:

“I’m assuming there’s going to be some more freedom to explore some things we haven’t explored in the past,”

Hard to know what that means. It’s not a lot of money to use in on marquee free agents. But in lieu of changes in the market the last couple of years, it does give him the opportunity to spread the money around on underpriced veterans. Or it could allow him to simply extend one or two players heading towards free agency he might not normally have been able to extend in the past. Those are all points to discuss today and in the future. We’ll all have fun speculating. However the only thing we know for sure when it comes to moves to be made by the Mike Hazen lead front office is we’ll know when we know, and not before. This is one tight ship folks.

2021:

Well the good news is Tomas is off the books, and overall guaranteed contracts costs are down to 24M. Arb costs are very low due too, at just 11M, due to all the free agents potentially leaving. But obviously looking this far out we have no idea which pre arb players will actually be on the roster. And we don’t know if any of the potential free agents such as Ray, Ahmed, and Peralta will be extended. Or perhaps there will be a qualifying offer or two extended and accepted. Bottom line though is starting in 2021 the team will have a lot of payroll flexibility, but also a lot of players to replace.