Joc Pederson Joins Other MLB Players In Criticizing Low Payrolls

One of the problems in baseball that the players hoped to address during their negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement was the disparity in team payrolls.

The wide gap between how much money teams like the Dodgers and Yankees spend on their rosters versus what teams like the Pirates and Orioles spend has helped to contribute to the general disparity in baseball. Franchises that do not invest in their on-field product struggle to stay competitive or to be competitive at all.

Even when a team like the Pirates gets to the playoffs, like they did from 2013 to 2015, sustaining success is a challenge when they are not retaining players because of a desire to keep payroll down. That’s to say nothing for the perennial losers, like the Orioles, who have not had a winning team since 2016. What’s worse than that is 115 and 110-loss seasons in 2018 and 2021.

The players’ frustration with this problem has not gone away since agreeing to the new CBA. In fact, some of them have become even more vocal about it.

Most recently, Giants outfielder Joc Pederson tweeted on Tuesday:

And earlier this week, White Sox pitcher Dallas Keuchel was asked about the growing competitiveness in the American League Central, and in his assessment of the division, he added a critique of the Cleveland Guardians payroll.

“And Cleveland is Cleveland, they always figure out a way to win and hang in there,” Keuchel told reporters. “From a CBA standpoint, I’d like Cleveland to pay their players more, but I’m not an ownership group, so I can’t say much.”

Keuchel has not been shy about speaking up on these issues. In 2019, he called the free agency process “sneaky” and suggested that owners were bending the rules when it took until June for him to get a contract.

“It’s just a stalemate. Nobody’s even thinking about free agency when free agency hits,” Keuchel said in 2019. “They’re taking their sweet time going to winter meetings and GM meetings. That’s something I’ve never gotten, either … that there’s major league talent ready to be signed, and owners and GMs are just taking vacations at that point in time, and just saying ‘Hey, we’ll get to it in a couple weeks.’”

In short, this is a problem that has been brewing for a number of years, and even with a new CBA, players still have frustrations.

It is worth noting that this year Max Scherzer will singlehandedly earn close to one-and-a-half times more than the Orioles will pay their players. His $43 million salary in 2022 also significantly eclipses what the Pirates and Guardians will shell out this year.

Finding a solution to this problem is thorny, because one of the most reasonable answers is to instate a salary floor. By forcing teams to pay at least a certain amount, they might at least be incentivized to be more active in free agency. That would not solve everything, but it would help to eliminate farcical things like one player making more than entire teams.

Picking out teams like the Orioles is easy, but there are also the middle of the pack teams who are paying enough to keep most of the criticism at bay but not enough to be serious about winning. Both Chicago teams, for instance, will sit well below the 2022 competitive balance tax threshold, and at least one of them is expected to be a contender this year.

That’s a problem. Talent is talent, but teams going into the season with salary levels so far behind the rest of the league helps to create the disparity players have grumbled behind the scenes about.

The main difference now might be that more of them will be more publicly vocal about it, like Pederson and Keuchel. Time will tell whether that makes a difference. For now, at least, it seems that owners of teams like the Guardians, Pirates, and Orioles will have a harder time hiding from answering questions about how much they are investing in their rosters.