With all arbitration eligible players now spoken for after Lucas Duda settled with the team for $4.2 million this morning, here’s where we stand with payroll.
Guaranteed Contracts ($82.93M)
David Wright $20.0M
Curtis Granderson $16.0M
Bartolo Colon $11.0M
Michael Cuddyer $8.5M
Daniel Murphy $8.0M
Dillon Gee $5.4M
Jon Niese $7.0M
Bobby Parnell $3.7M
Ruben Tejada $1.88M
John Mayberry Jr. $1.45M
Lucas Duda $4.2M
Jenrry Mejia $2.6M
That’s a total of 12 players making $89.43 million.
Using the major league minimum of $507,500 to fill the remaining 13 spots on the roster, that gives us a total of roughly $6.6 million.
Adding all of that up brings us to a total current payroll of $96.03 million.
If you trade Dillon Gee than you’re looking at an Opening Day payroll of roughly $90.63 million dollars.
Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports, recently noted and took issue with the Mets payroll level, saying:
“The New York Mets, who play in America’s biggest market and would have a $96.7 million team if the season started today – about $15 million less than Kansas City, $14 million lower than Cincinnati, $10 million under Milwaukee and $8 million behind Minnesota, whose four metropolitan-area populations combined aren’t half as big as the Mets’.”
The league average payroll is expected to be about $110 million, putting the Mets below that level.
*** By the way, I’m not adding in an arbitrary $6 million just because a Met executive said we should to account for changes throughout the year. I’ll update payroll as it needs to be updated. My reasoning is that it could also go $6 million lower, for example if you trade Murphy and Colon to make room for Syndergaard and Herrera payroll goes way lower. And I certainly can see that happening at the trade deadline.
One of the people I follow on Twitter, former MMO minor league analyst Tejesh, perhaps said it best.
“The problem isn’t that the Mets payroll is too low. It’s that the owners have no capability to raise it for the right players.”
And of course the biggest fear is after enduring six losing seasons waiting to build a brand new core of young players, will the Mets be able to keep them together the way the Braves and Yankees kept their cores together during their sustained successful runs? You see, that’s the big elephant in the room the Mets owners and their propagandists don’t want you to talk about… That.
