Bleacher Bums Forum

How does citing the stats of 1 guy have any relevance?

"It was cooler than normal last Tuesday.  Ergo, climate change is a myth."

ArizonaPhil's take on 2019 Cubs payroll and free agent possibilities:

So the Cubs will be about $10M inder the 2019 Competitive Balance Tax ("Luxury Tax") threshold even if they sign no free-agents, and that's even after they decline the 2019 $20M option on Cole Hamels (which they almost certainly will). They would save about $5M AAV by non-tendering Addison Russell (which would get their AAV+PBC down to $190M), but otherwise there won't be much wiggle-room unless the Cubs are able to unload contracts in a trade.

It's possible that the Cubs will attempt to trade one or two arbitration-eligibles like Kyle Schwarber and/or Mike Montgomery for prospects, but even doing that won't save more than about another $5M AAV combined, and they probably couldn't get "A"-level prospects back for either player. And while Jose Quintana might seem like a trade-candidate because he is making $10.5M (presuming the Cubs pick-up his club option) in 2019, the AAV of his contract is only $4.45M because he signed his multi-year deal when he was still pre-arbitration, so there isn't much savings in 2019 payroll AAV if the Cubs trade Quintana. 

Otherwise, unless they can find takers for Tyler Chatwood, Brandon Kintzler, Brian Duensing, and/or Drew Smyly (whose combined contracts are worth $25M AAV), or eat a large chunk of his salary ($23M AAV) and trade Heyward (who now can be traded - see comment below), the Cubs are pretty-much stuck payroll-wise going into the post- 2018 off-season.

And so unless they are OK with exceeding the CBT threshold (and suffer the penalties that go along with that), there is almost no way they can sign a free-agent like Bryce Harper or Manny Machado to a high-AAV contract this coming off-season, and in fact they probably couldn't even re-sign somebody like RHRP Jesse Chavez without exceeding the CBT threshold unless they non-tender Russell or trade Schwarber and Montgomery.

Yeah, the Cubs have the cash to do exactly what the Dodgers, Yankees, and Red Sox do. Based just on financial penalties, they should be over the threshold most years going forward.

From MLB.com (link below), it appears that the only draft penalty occurs if they go at least $40 million over (which would be spending at least $246 million next year). And the only penalty would be that their first pick in the draft would drop 10 spots (unless the Cubs have one of the first 6 picks--then their second pick would drop 10 spots instead). That shouldn't be a big concern for the Cubs either--dropping from the 26th pick in the draft to the 36th pick isn't a big deal if it means you can sign Harper instead of, say, AJ Pollock. The Cubs shouldn't be picking high enough in the draft for that to be a really meaningful penalty.

http://m.mlb.com/glossary/transactions/competitive-balance-tax

One of the hitters is going to get traded away to get someone to take chatwood's salary off their hands.

Man's gotta feed his family...