Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Sunday, December 20, 2020
Major League Baseball payrolls plunged to $1.75 billion during the pandemic-shortened season from $4.22 billion, and the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers led with $98.6 million—the smallest payroll for the top spender in 20 years.
Base wages for 40-man rosters tumbled to $1.54 billion, according to information sent from Major League Baseball to teams on Friday night and obtained by The Associated Press. That was down from $3.99 billion in 2019.
Prorated portions of signing bonuses totaled $120.6 million, down slightly from $122.8 million. Earned bonuses fell to $25 million from $26.9 million.
Buyouts of unexercised 2021 options came to $58.2 million, more than double the $26.9 million for buyouts of unexercised 2020 options, a sign of expense-cutting amid the revenue loss.
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1. Walt Davis Posted: December 20, 2020 at 10:59 PM (#5995280)I'd like to see the raw data on the options to see how big that effect is. I assume that the 2021 total for options was similar to 2020 and therefore this is a real change -- i.e. there were $90 M of options in each year (just a number) and $58 M were declined this year vs. $27 last year. But this year's also included Lester ($10 M buyout) and Daniel Murphy ($6 M, you can always count on the Rox) so if there didn't happen to be anybody like that last year, that would be half the difference. I'd also like to see the list just to get a sense of how many I agreed with last time vs. this time.
I suggest reading that one.
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