2013 All-Salary Teams

We're now a week and a half into the 2013 baseball season, and although I still have a full third of the teams to preview, seeing as we're less than a week from Tax Day, this seems like the right time to highlight the players who will be surrendering the most cash to Uncle Sam at this time next year. The players in the following lineups represent the highest-paid players in their respective leagues, and I hope that grouping them all together like this will allow us to analyze how well (or how poorly) economic value corresponds to on-field value. Or, failing that, we can just gawk at the most well-to-do players in the league and wish we had what they have.

A note on the process: All the salary information contained in these lists comes from the wonderfully comprehensive site Cot's Baseball Contracts. The fine folks at Baseball Reference does a pretty good job of tracking this stuff on the Payroll, Roster, and Uniforms section of each team's page, but when I read the fine print and realized that they use Cot's as well, I figured I'd go straight to the source, and I found much more information. Due to the high number of high salary players ($10mm or more) I've split these teams up by league. Here's the NL team right now:

The Red Sox are paying a portion of Gonzalez and Crawford's salaries.

Right away you'll notice that two teams dominate this list. The Phillies got there through a combination of locking up their homegrown talent to ridiculously lucrative deals (Chase Utley and Cole Hamels are the only ones that show up on the list, but they have a couple of close seconds, who will be discussed later) and aggressively going after pricey free agent pitchers (again, only Cliff Lee and Jonathan Papelbon show up here, but runners-up will figure in prominently). The Dodgers on the other hand mostly inherited the biggest contracts from other teams via trade (Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford from the Red Sox and Hanley Ramirez from the Marlins), although there are exceptions to both rules. Those exceptions are Philadelphia's third baseman Michael Young (whose contract was inherited from the Rangers) and Los Angeles' center fielder Matt Kemp (a homegrown talent signed to a lucrative extension).

Before we leave the two free-spending juggernauts, let's take a closer look at the shortstop position, where Hanley Ramirez is currently on the DL from an injury sustained during the World Baseball Classic. If we were actually building a real or fantasy lineup out of these players, we'd have to go one spot further down into the depth chart, where we find Jimmy Rollins of the Phillies. Also, if we were playing by American League rules, the DH spot would go to the highest paid runner-up, who in this case is Ryan Howard of the Phillies. His $20mm per year (which goes up to $25mm for the next three seasons) narrowly beats out Reds 1B Joey Votto and Cubs LF Alfonso Soriano.

Lee, Hamels and Halladay are part of the most expensive rotation in baseball.

On the pitching side, another big player emerges in the San Francisco Giants. Perfect gamer Matt Cain was the recipient of a big extension and two-time Cy Young award winner Tim Lincecum is heading for free agency at the end of this year after milking the arbitration process for all it was worth. If we look for a replacement for the year's most expensive pitcher - injured Johan Santana, who hasn't been the same since pitching his no-hitter last year - we are left with a choice between two $20mm starters from (surprise, surprise) either the Phillies (Roy Halladay) or the Giants (Barry Zito). Given Doc's struggles so far in his potential walk year, and the fact that Zito currently leads the NL in Baseball Referece WAR (Wins Above Replacement), I might have to go with the former A's lefty here. This means that two more Dodgers salary busters Zack Greinke ($19mm) and Josh Beckett ($17mm) are left on the cutting room floor.

Moving on to the AL, we see an even more drastic skew towards one team, and it's no surprise who that is:

Who says things have changed from the old Evil Empire days? Every player on the Yankees' infield is the highest-paid player in the league at that position, including the highest-paid player in all of baseball (third baseman Alex Rodriguez, who might not even get a chance to play in 2013). In addition, they've got two of the AL's three most expensive outfielders, the most expensive starting pitcher and the most expensive relief pitcher (Mariano Rivera is the lone $10mm reliever in the AL). The only non-Yankees to take the field for this team are catcher Joe Mauer (who will get the same $23mm per year like clockwork for the next whopping five seasons, until he's 35 years old) and slumping outfielder Josh Hamilton (he played exclusively left and center field for the Rangers last year, but the presence of Mike Trout and Peter Bourjos in the Angels' outfield has forced him to right.

In several strokes of bad luck, four of those above-mentioned Yankees hitters started the season on the DL and are not close to returning, so we have to take a look at the salary depth chart. Robinson Cano is off to a hot start and Vernon Wells, who has been traded twice since signing his supposedly untradeable contract extension with the Blue Jays, was brought in as a last minute fill-in due to these other injuries. Starting with the highest injured salary, this team actually gets better by replacing A-Rod, because the second-most expensive third baseman is MVP and Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera ($21mm), who has only become more valuable since signing his extension with the Tigers because back then he was still a first baseman. Mark Teixeira (who was also injured during the WBC) actually has a base salary about half a million dollars lower than Cabrera's teammate Prince Fielder's 2013 haul, but with various bonuses included, the Yankees switch hitter technically comes out on top. While Derek Jeter recovers from the broken ankle he suffered during the 2012 postseason, Toronto's Jose Reyes will fill in on a contract the Blue Jays inherited from the Marlins. Curtis Granderson is the only 2013 center fielder with a $10mm-plus paycheck, but if we consider players who had played center as recently as 2012, the mantle falls to Shane Victorino ($13mm) who was pushed to right field in the Red Sox's new-look outfield.

In an unusual instance of market efficiency, two of the league's top three highest paid pitchers are also the two of the three highest ranked pitchers in the league: Justin Verlander and Felix Hernandez. While none of these starters began the season on the DL, Jered Weaver and John Lackey both suffered early arm injuries and are currently on the shelf. The next option on the depth chart, Chicago's second $15mm player John Danks, has no timetable to return from arthroscopic surgery on his left shoulder. The next to options are very viable candidates indeed, and they come from very familiar teams: Hiroki Kuroda is making $15mm from the Yankees in his second consecutive one-year deal, and the two-year extension Jake Peavy signed with the White Sox before this season pays him $14.5mm in 2013.


The minimum salary for a major league player is $490,000 so the bottom line is that nobody who plays this game for a living should have much trouble paying their bills. Granted athletes have a more expensive lifestyle than the average American, and also remember that these figures are before taxes. But the moral of the story is that if any of the above players invites you to spend a weekend at their beach house or take a ride in their private jet, take them up on it, because they can absolutely afford the best.