Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be kicking off your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
In Friday’s column, I took the time to write down a long list of players who could potentially be waived and requested before September 1st, the deadline for them to be eligible for their new clubs.
The Rangers are the most impressive of the teams I covered in that piece, for the obvious reason that they hold the World Series titles. Most of the players from last year’s club are still there, although some of them are injured, and with Texas struggling this season, the organization and its fans hope that the surgery was far from over. That said, the Rangers are running out of time. The trade deadline has passed and their chances of defecting are less than 2%. The reality of their situation led me to ask the following question: Could the team that just won the World Series become the Angels in less than a year?
Perhaps that suggestion is a bit of an exaggeration. After all, the Angels are one of the most underperforming organizations in baseball and, again, the Rangers just won the championship. However, there are obvious parallels to be drawn between the 2024 Ranger and last year’s Angels when it comes to how they approached the trade deadline. The morning before this year’s deadline, the Rangers had a 12.0% chance of making the finals; at that time last season, the Angels’ odds were better, at 19.5%. Those postseason opportunities haven’t stopped either team from adding players when they probably would have been better off dealing their players with expiring contracts. The Rangers got Andrew Chafin and Carson Kelly, and last year the Angels went all in by trading Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo López, Randal Grichuk, CJ Cron and Dominic Leone. And both groups have seen their differences deepen after years of doing so. The Angels went on to finish with a losing record for the ninth straight season, while the Rangers’ odds stood at 1.6% entering Monday’s game.
Last year, the Angels traded away four of the five players they traded — Giolito, Grichuk, Leone, and López — along with Matt Moore and Hunter Renfroe. Grichuk was the only one who was not wanted. At that point, the Halos knew they weren’t going to the playoffs, so they decided to see if they could fire some of their expiring players to spend the rest of their salary. Before releasing the six players, the Angels reported that they would be above the initial luxury tax estimate, but when the five were accounted for, the team, surprisingly, danced over the tax line by just $30,000.
Guardians may try to achieve the same thing because, after all, they are in the same situation. We currently make the Rangers’ CBT fee just under $251 million, or about $14 million above the tax line. Since the Rangers paid a luxury tax last season, but not in 2022, all excesses will incur a 30% tax, so that $14 million would be $18.2 million. Since their CBT salary is less than $257 million, they will not pay an additional bonus, and they will not be reinstated to their ten positions, as they would be if their salary was at least $287 million.
Exceeding $14 million is too much to give up on books, but it’s impossible if they act quickly. If they wait until before the end of the month to cut players, they likely won’t be able to drop enough salary to come under the cap. Previously the Rangers placed players on waivers, initially those players were not wanted, thereby removing them from the Texas payroll early, which would reduce the team’s CBT payroll.
Here is the money that would come off the books if the Rangers released their players from expiring contracts and those players were wanted on August 31:
- Nathan Eovaldi: $2,650,538 (Eovaldi has a $20 million player option available to him for 36 more innings.)
- Max Scherzer: $2,078,853 (A portion of the $30,833,333 the Mets muster will be transferred to the new team; the Rangers don’t get to keep it.)
- Andrew Heaney: $2,026,882
- David Robertson: $1,559,140
- José Leclerc: $974,462
- Kirby Yates: $701,613
- Andrew Chafin: $662,634 (Chafin has a 2025 club option for $6.5 million.)
- Carson Kelly: $545,699
- José Ureña: $272,849
- Travis Jankowski: $265,054
- Robbie Grossman: $233,871
That adds up to just under $12 million, or $2 million of what the Rangers will need to cover salary. But if all of these players were claimed by August 25 instead, the Rangers would be able to take $14.5 million off the books, enough to avoid paying the tax.
However, what makes things difficult is this: Who exactly was not wanted? Eovaldi and Scherzer would have to go and make the CBT machines work, but both would come with injury concerns. Scherzer, who arrived in IL shortly after the deadline, is now getting some more scrutiny on his tired shoulder, making it a landmine to scout him. Eovaldi left his last start with “strength on the side,” which at least puts his next start in doubt; even if this doesn’t send him to IL, it’s something that would make teams disappear if he was found. And if the Rangers don’t know if teams will want both pitchers, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea for them to try to shed the salaries of their other players.
Rangers have managed to extend their TV deal with Diamond Sports Group (which operates Bally Sports), but only for one year, leaving their broadcasts until 2025 uncertain. As we’ve seen with the Padres, Diamondbacks, and Rockies, MLB is willing to take over the teams’ broadcasts after their deals with Diamond Sports have expired, but those are direct-to-consumer packages, commissioner Rob Manfred said. t generate as much revenue as deals with regional sports networks. Even though the league will now redistribute balance tax payments to teams that lost TV deals, it’s unclear whether the payments — which amount to $15 million per team — will be enough to make up the difference. So while it could be argued that from a purely financial standpoint, the Rangers would have to shell out any salary knowing there is so much uncertainty next season, I don’t think they should.
Even if keeping everyone around is just to please the fans and give them a better team to root for, the value in that is nothing. Fans spend money, and any drop in attendance will have a negative impact on Rangers. It would also not send a good message to the fans or the remaining players if Rangers were to play this season, their title defense campaign, where the only purpose of removing the white flag would be to cut costs. (Yes, the pun was very much intended.) It would have been a lot easier to sell a fire sale at the deadline than it is now; at least two weeks ago, the organization would not have found players who could contribute to a winning club in the near future. Of course, you could make the case that the decision not to trade earlier shouldn’t affect the Rangers now, that getting something, even a salary waiver, is better than getting nothing at all. After all, the players that the Rangers can fire now are waiting for free agents who may not be available next year. However, let’s take a look at what could happen if the Rangers release a few players and try to re-sign them later in the season.
Money always talks but it seems unlikely that these players will want to return to the team that sent them out without the reason that the organization does not want to pay them. Future free agents, too, may think twice about signing with the Rangers, opting not to go to a team that recently released its key contributors for financial purposes.
In the end, I tend to think that this is more of a thought exercise than a significant opportunity: Rangers owner Ray Davis really likes to win, and as I’ve found, the CBT incentive isn’t there for them like it was for the Angels. The Angels were trying to end their playoff drought and quickly reversed course. Meanwhile, the Rangers just won their first title and are looking to fight for their second next year, and unlike the Angels, the Rangers have a legitimate path to winning the 2025 World Series despite their woes this season. Revocation of the lease would not change that, and the potential moral obstacles would be too great to ignore. If the benefits are so small and the downsides so unknown, why break up? Just play the thread and reload in 2025.
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