Let’s take a clear-eyed look at this Mariners payroll situation
Unless things change, it’s another offseason just scraping by.
I hate that I care about the Mariners’ payroll. I hate that we care about it to the level we do. We stalk it. At least most of us. It’s the whole story right now, and most of the narrative the rest of the year.
While I could rant about it again—And again. And again.—we’re not going to do that here. I’ve been and am fussy enough about it. So we’ll try a different tact. Let’s slow down, walk through it, wrap our heads around it in a very literal sense.
Maybe some folks don’t know what the current situation is and how much better it could be. Maybe it’s healthy to have a little check-in on this.
The Mariners made their non-tender decisions official last weekt. Josh Rojas and his expected $4 to $5 million salary for 2025 are on their way out of the organization, along with a couple relievers. You could call these developments the impetus for this post, and that wouldn’t be untrue, but it’s only a small part of the story.
Let’s set the scene here quick. And again, let’s set aside my take on this.
It’s a consensus—lack of spending is holding the Mariners back
The view that payroll limitations and the ownership group are holding this organization back is pervasive throughout baseball. It’s undeniable.
If you’re like me, you may have opened Jeff Passan’s latest for ESPN—on the most interesting teams to watch this offseason—and scrolled quickly to see if the Mariners, in the eyes of the most prominent MLB analyst, were worthy of discussion. They were.
And it starts with this:
With the Astros declining, the Rangers full of uncertainty, the A's still owned by John Fisher and the Angels by Arte Moreno, the AL West is there for the taking. But it has become abundantly clear that Mariners ownership has no intention of spending at the sort of level that could take a team with a very good core and excellent farm system and turn it into consistent division favorites.
“No intention.” Ah.
Another ESPN MLB insider, Kiley McDaniel—who has extensive experience on the media side of the baseball ops curtain and the other—offered his perspective on the Mariners’ offseason ahead to the Bump and Stacy show on Seattle Sports radio.
There’s a number of quotes I could snag and the whole interview is worthwhile but here’s a good synopsis.
“They’ve done a really good job creating a good farm system full of young hitters,” McDaniel said. “So I think unfortunately … the easiest answer is to just wait a year or two until these guys come up and then you maybe have the homegrown solution, but then some of the veterans that are contributing right now, they might be gone, which then creates another problem. … There is not an easy solution to this issue other than raising payroll, which is obviously only up to the owner.”
Only one easy solution. Only up to the owner. Obviously.
Finally, I’ll get to a take closer to home.
I’ve greatly enjoyed the hits the Seattle Times’s Ryan Divish and Adam Jude have been doing with Jason Puckett and his PuckSports program—so I went ahead and subscribed to the Puck’s Posse to get the recent two-hour Mariners roundtable.
(Also, I like that Puck called it not subscription but “a membership that supports live, local and entertaining sports media.” Hell yeah. Support things you think should exist.)
On the segment, both Divish and Jude underscore how so much of this comes down to an unwillingness to invest in the Major League roster.
Here’s one representative string of quotes on Mariners ownership, from Divish.
It’s an unrealistic vision of what they think the fans think of them and it’s been a problem for a long time. When they made the postseason in 2022, they thought, okay, all the goodwill they had lost for those years was back.
Well, no. No. You gotta post. You got to build on that. Instead, they went the cheap way.
Because, as Adam said, if you give them $30 million a year, you can fix a lot of things. If they would have had an increased payroll going into last season or the season before, when they went the Tommy La Stella route, they wouldn't be in the position they are now…And that's the problem they run into.[…]
You can't keep patch-working it together. At some point you say “We're going to win and we're going to invest more to ensure that we don't have these issues".”
Or—get out.
That’s where we stand. Well, in terms of the broad perception of the club.
Where the Mariners are now on payroll
In terms of actual news with some bearing on the future, that brings us back to Josh Rojas and other non-tenders. More specifically, I think this is the nugget of Mariners news most folks are hanging on.
This could be like a funny math word problem for first graders.
Alright kids, the Mariners made some moves to free up $8 million in salary. A reporter covering the team says they doubled the money they were expected to have available.
How much money did they have budgeted available coming into the offseason? And how much to they have available now?
That’s right! They came into the offseason with $8 million budgeted to be available and now have $16 million.
Alriiiight then. On the aforementioned roundtable, Jude said they had about the same available—but $15 to $20 million, probably closer to $15.
It’s unclear whether this adds to that earlier estimation but they both come from Jude anyway and one’s more recent—so we’ll go with $16 million, supposedly, to spend before Opening Day.
It obviously could be more if they shed more payroll. It could also be more if ownership says there should be more.
As always, it’s about context. For that context, I’ll share a graph I’ve shared a few times on this blog and will probably share a few times again.
It’s where the Mariners rank, relative to their peers, in Opening Day payroll.
I like looking at Opening Day because it’s a good point in time for a temperature check and is most reflective of the time period—the offseason free agency window—when ownership groups can most put their fingers on the scale.
Here is where the Mariners ranked on Opening Day of last year and going back to 2001.
Cot’s is the only place I can find the Opening Day figures consistently, so while you may see some spots put those ~2018ish clubs top ten in payroll, it may be on account of the in-season spending.
That said, we sometimes need to bounce spot to spot to get the full data. For example, while Cot’s has their own projections for 2025, FanGraphs are a little more universally utilized. Same with SpoTrac.
Like I said, I’m just looking to lay out the best information I can find—without inserting my opinion into it, for now. This is just context I think everyone should know.
For perspective, it’s worth sharing ownership’s own take on all this, what they believe we should know as their justification for their spending or lack thereof.
Here’s John Stanton to Daniel Kramer.
“We’re roughly the 15th-largest market in baseball,” Stanton said. “We're pretty much smack dab in the middle in terms of the size of the market, and that means that we're about average in our ability to generate revenue and to do those things…
With that in mind, let’s run through a few things—first, the present and immediate future. But then the past and what could’ve been.
Crunching the numbers for 2025
Well, “crunching” is probably a little strong a word. I’m not doing anything fancy. You’ll see.
First things first, the Seattle-Tacoma market is the 13th-ranked television market in the United States. Though, to be fair, some markets have two teams—thus reducing the number of available viewers/customers/sponsors because many just aren’t going to support two teams equally, to the level these user groups would a single team in another market.
Also, market size and payroll thing obviously isn’t a 1:1 thing for spending in baseball. Tampa-St. Petersburg, for example, is the #12 TV market. San Diego is #30.
It is what it is. Now what’s it mean for 2025?
Fangraphs has the Mariners at $146 million in projected 2025 payroll (not CBT payroll, actual); Cot’s has them at $144 million. If we take Adam Jude literally, and trust these estimates the Mariners have approximately $160 to $162 million set aside for 2025 Opening Day Payroll.
Let’s call it $162 million.
If the 2025 Mariners have an Opening Day payroll of $162 million, that will probably rank right around 15th in Opening Day payroll.
This one’s tough because we don’t know exactly where this free agent market goes. It’s not a bad class, and spending is always going up. But the 15th-ranked Opening Day payroll in 2024 was $167.8 million. In 2023, it was $176.5 million.
So the average (mean) payroll will almost certainly go up, but it’s hard to guess on the median. What does it mean for the Mariners? I’ll let you decide.
But it’s more than fair to say a payroll of around $160-$165 million will probably be 15th at best. Maybe a bit below. That’s barely a difference, competitively, from where they’ve been in recent years (17th in 2024 and 18th in 2023).
If the 2025 Mariners have approximately $16-$20 million to spend, they can…
Take on a player like Nico Hoerner’s money in a trade—$11.67m AAV through 2026
Possibly sign Justin Turner or Carlos Santana to an approximately $7-$8 million one-year deal
And that’s about it, without further maneuvering. Probably a reliever or two. Maybe some salary shedding deals.
But what if…that weren’t the case?
We’ll be pretty generous here and use some 2024 numbers when the 2025 ones would probably go up.
If the Mariners spent commensurate with their market size (roughly 13th), they’d have $175-$180 million in 2025 Opening Day payroll and $30-$35 million to spend.
I’m going to present the FanGraphs crowdsourced numbers and let you decide how much of a premium the Mariners would have to pay, but, here’s $30-$35ish million spent using those projections.
Christian Walker on a $18 million AAV three-year deal
Ha-Seong Kim on a $18 million AAV four-year deal
$36 million—so sue me.
But you can start to see how even relatively minor climbs up the payroll rank can make an enormous difference.
If the Mariners spent like a team finally ready to start throwing its weight around, reaching the top 10 in Opening Day payroll, they’d have approximately $50-$55 million to spend.
Again, not saying “Here’s a deal I would do!” or that it’s exactly the players I would get, but for perspective here’s a combination of crowdsourced contracts under or around that threshold:
Willy Adames on a $25 million AAV six-year deal
Alex Bregman on a $27 million AAV six-year deal
Second base and third base taken care of nice and tidy.
Finally, if the Mariners spent as they did at their peak—7th in Opening Day payroll in ‘03, ‘05 and ‘07—they would have $65-$70 million to spend this offseason.
So that’d mean something like:
Juan Soto on a 13-year $45 million AAV deal (That’s probably light, I know, but again—crowdsourced at FG).
Shed like $5-10 million in moving Victor Robles or Randy Arozarena
Christian Walker on a $18 million AAV three-year deal
Nico Hoerner in a trade, $11.67m AAV through 2026
Whew. Anything close to that—like Soto alone—would be fun. Alas, this winter’s not going to yield anything close.
Obviously, it’s all much more complicated than that. You can’t just sign up for the crowdsourced number and get the guy.
That said, players take the best deal available more often than they don’t. It’s just how it works. When an owner or ownership group is there at the table willing to do whatever it takes to get their guy, they can get them.
I wonder how many big free agent meetings John Stanton or Chris Larson will be in this offseason.
After running 17th, 18th, 22nd and 25th-ranked Opening Day payrolls the last four years respectively, you’d think there’d be some rubber-banding on the money saved, propelling them above Stanton’s own “smack dab in the middle” figure and perhaps well beyond.
But no.
Arbitration raises will do most of the elevating, and they may add on a smidge beyond that—but in the end, unless things change, they’ll have about a league-average payroll.
They keep saying they want to be something more than an average team, a real winner that competes for titles.
But they’re unwilling to invest like it.