Philadelphia Phillies: Handing out Their Payroll Based on Success
January 4, 2012 by Greg Pinto
Filed under Fan News
It’s time for the obvious fact of the day: Baseball players make a lot of money.
With the ratifying of MLB‘s new collective bargaining agreement, no player that will don a Major League uniform in 2012 will earn a salary of less than $480,000. Yes folks, that is the minimum salary for big league baseball players.
That’s just the beginning, however. The polar opposite of the minimum salary would be the deal that Albert Pujols signed just this winter, netting the new Los Angeles Angels‘ first baseman $250 million over a 10 year span, or the 10 year, $275 million deal that Alex Rodriguez signed with the New York Yankees.
The point is this: Whether you’re talking about a first-year player or one of the best athletes in the game, baseball players are well compensated.
That makes managing the payroll all the more important, and the Philadelphia Phillies have one of the biggest budgets to manage in the game. Needless to say, there are a few great deals on that payroll and a couple of albatrosses.
Managing a payroll is difficult. With the spending limit for most teams being the $178 million luxury tax threshold, teams have to make tough decisions, and the Phillies are no different. A lot of times, a number of variables come into play: The market for a player, his marketability, the depth of his position, his value to your team weighed against his value to other teams.
We live in a day in age where teams rarely pay for past success, but instead, projections of what a player’s statistics will look like moving forward, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it makes us wonder: What would a player’s salary look like in 2012 if we took into account, first and foremost, his success from the previous year?
This slideshow will attempt to divvy up the Phillies’ payroll, handing out the most money to its most successful players. A number of variables will be taken into consideration for each player, described on his respective slide.
What would the Phillies’ payroll look like if it were based on past success?
For up to the minute Phillies’ coverage, check out Greg’s blog: The Phillies Phactor.