Phillies to see largest drop in payroll in all of baseball
The Phillies' epic payroll of the 2009-14 years will see a dramatic decrease with big names off the books.
The last year the Phillies' team payroll was below $100,000,000, they won a World Series.
But ever since 2009, when the blossoming, NL-favorite Phillies were the team to beat, the payroll has leapt upward, except from 2012-13, when it dipped a bit before ballooning again to previously unseen heights.
2008: $ 98,269,880
2009: $113,004,046
2010: $138,178,379
2011: $165,976,381
2012: $172,093,902
2013: $159,585,714
2014: $177,729,967
That's part of being a team that good, expensive players want to play for, having the deep pockets to pay them, and employing a GM whose measurements and timing contract-wise have been frequently called into queston.
Now, as the team enters a new era of constructing a staircase to escape the cellar, things are different. Marlon Byrd and most notably Jimmy Rollins are already gone, and rumors swirl around players with big contracts like Cole Hamels and Ryan Howard. The Phillies would likely have to take on the continued payment of some of their larger deals, even in a trade, but still, the numbers are going to go down, as Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports tweeted earlier:
The offseason is still young, and those other teams could ditch some of their bigger contracts. Also, $43.6 million is a mere dent in the Phillies' $177,729,967 2014 payroll, not even close to getting them below the $100 million threshold.