2020 salary terms are set to be hammered out in the coming days. But what about what’s owed to players beyond that point? The near-term economic picture remains questionable at best. That’ll make teams all the more cautious with guaranteed future salaries.
Every organization has some amount of future cash committed to players, all of it done before the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe. There are several different ways to look at salaries; for instance, for purposes of calculating the luxury tax, the average annual value is the touchstone, with up-front bonuses spread over the life of the deal. For this exercise, we’ll focus on actual cash outlays that still have yet to be paid.
We’ll run through every team, with a big assist from the Cot’s Baseball Contracts database. First up is the Red Sox:
Red Sox Total Future Cash Obligation: $355.85MM
*includes Chris Sale contract deferrals
*includes remaining obligations to David Price (traded to Dodgers)
*J.D. Martinez can opt out of contract after 2020
(click to expand/view detail list)
Big market team has high salary obligations.
Covid absolutely helped the Sox right on year one of rebuild
Not really, if there’s no season. In that case getting under the luxury tax threshold would not count.
Totally off topic but the Arizona governor have the ok to open major league sports back up yesterday, with restrictions.
that was mentioned in a previous article here
Will be interesting to see what JD does, unless he has an absolute monster year, I expect him to opt-in for 2021. The MLB economy may improve by the end of the 2021 season so he may be able to top the $19.35M he would be scheduled to make in 2022. But I can’t imagine he tops that for 2021.
I agree, JD will never opt out with Boras advising him.
I miss having Dumb-browski in the AL east.
Jd probably paid half his contract to boras
There’s a cap on percentage earnings for agents
Not sure how the accounting works from a CBT perspective but Pedroia is owed $18M total in deferred salary from 2021 – 2028. Maybe it’s structured in a way that his comp comes off the books from a CBT standpoint after 2021, but he is definitely owed a lot more cash after the 2021 season.