Photography by Scott Rovak
Here’s a statistic you don’t see every day:
The combined base salaries of Matt Carpenter, Michael Wacha, Trevor Rosenthal, Matt Adams, Joe Kelly, Lance Lynn, Pete Kozma, Carlos Martinez, Kevin Siegrist, Seth Maness, Daniel Descalso, Jon Jay, Shane Robinson, Shelby Miller, Adron Chambers, and Kolten Wong equal about $8 million.
That’s right. No fewer than the aforementioned 16 members of the St. Louis Cardinals’ 25-man World Series roster are playing for Major League Baseball’ minimum wage of $490,000 or just slightly above it.
Pitcher Jake Westbrook, not on the post-season roster, is earning more than all of them combined at $8.75 million this year. What can you say?
In contrast, the Boston Red Sox have only six players at or near the minimum, and none of them are among the top players on the team. Conversely, Boston has 15 players earning $3 million or more, while the Cardinals have just six—Matt Holliday, Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright, Carlos Beltran, and, yes, John Axford and Edward Mujica.
There are a number of ways to interpret this data.
The most obvious and positive note is that the Cardinals’ farm system is at the top of Major League Baseball—arguably by a wide margin—and that the 2013 success story is really about the triumph of youth. All of the 16 minimum-wagers are under 29, and 10 them are 25 and under.
Unfortunately, it’s a small hop for the local sporting press to discern that this must be proof positive of the Cardinal Way, meaning the triumph of virtue, hard work, tradition, and playing the right way—in contrast to the greed and soullessness of the prima donnas who perform for teams in places like Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. The corollary is that our Cardinals are all about respect and Midwestern values, not big bucks.
It helps in digesting the homer narrative to overlook that a lunch-pail Midwesterner like Wainwright is in the middle of an 11-year run of selflessness that will earn him roughly $157 million. Ditto for Holliday’s seven years for $120 million or Molina’s $96.5 over 10 years.
Those contracts are fine by me, by the way—as if any of us should concern ourselves about the payroll of the well-heeled Cardinals ownership—but those fellows are easily overlooked when local sportswriters rail about the checkbooks of the opposition.
There should be no moral takeaways here. It’s all a function of the salary structure negotiated between owners and players, one that holds down salaries in the first couple of years, provides some growth in the next few arbitration-eligible years, and then allows successful players to reap huge fortunes in free agency when they hit their sixth year of service.
As extraordinary as the Cardinals have performed in raising home-grown talent, the same cannot be said—with some exceptions—in the financial management of veteran, proven talent. Some of that is bad luck: injured Chris Carpenter, Rafael Furcal, and Jason Motte are on the books for a combined $22 million this year while appearing in the same number of games as you and me. Perennially injured Jaime Garcia got $5.75 million this year as part of his four-year, $27 million package.
But injuries aside, it will be interesting to see what lessons are taken by owners from the Cardinals’ remarkable success with minimum-wage talent in 2013. You can bet there are some unpleasant meetings taking place for team presidents and general managers called on the carpet by ownership groups inquiring about why their farm systems are consistently smoked by that of the Cardinals.
And on the home front, it’s safe to say that the remarkably successful ownership group headed by Bill DeWitt Jr. isn’t exactly beating itself up over the team’s financial approach. Let’s enjoy the next week of baseball, because fans of free-agency rumors should have a pretty boring winter ahead in St. Louis.
Commentary by Ray Hartmann
