2009 Astros Payroll Update

As per entropic soul's request, here's some updated payroll figures plus the list of players that are either on the 40-man roster, are Rule 5 picks, or are non-roster invitees to spring training. 

First, we'll start with the payroll that is locked in.  This includes the salaries of 18 players (including Oscar Villareal) and adds up to $95.985 million.  I was generous and went ahead and said everybody met all of their incentive clauses, no matter how ridiculous:  Backe (+$825k for 220+ innings), Hampton (+$2 million), and Hawkins (+$600k).

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We have two players headed to arbitration.  Here are the figures both the player and the team submitted.  Since the sum of the players' bids are a worst case scenario, those will be the numbers I use when totaling up at the end.

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There are 4 known remaining players on the 25-man roster.  I gave them all a slight bump over their previous year's pay because the labor agreement has the minimum salary for 2009 set at $400k.  I gave Sampson a bigger raise because he has slightly more service time and was paid slightly more last year.  These are just guesses on my part and I may be off (but probably not by much).

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This leaves two more slots open on the 25-man roster:  a catcher and a backup infielder.  I imagine these two slots will be filled by guys making the major league minimum...Lou Palmisano and Drew Sutton, for instance.  So we'll tack on an additional $800k to represent them. 

So here's the totalboard so far:  $95.985 million + $5.1 million + $1.668 million +$0.8 million = $103,553,000.  This falls short of Ed Wade's $107 million estimate by about $3.5 million.  It may be possible that Ed Wade was taking other figures into account, like Cooper's salary and the various incentive clauses involving Gold Gloves, Silver Sluggers, Cy Youngs and World Series MVPs.       

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Here are the other guys you can expect to see at Spring Training:

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If anyone sees any errors in my charts or if I've left out some known information, let me know in the comments so I can include them.