Opening Day salary information is a bit confusing this year. Several different publications have already weighed in, and they all don’t agree on what has happened. Some say the average MLB salary is up about 1%. Others say it’s down about 1%. Baseball Prospectus, our official salary information source, says the average salary is down 1%, but the average payroll is up 1%. Apparently, as far as I can tell, the teams are carrying an unusually high number of players on the DL, so the 25-man roster + DL totals are up while the averages are down.
I have to admit I was kind of hoping for salaries to go down this year. If the salary cap dropped its maximum under our rules — by 6% — then it would be down about $15,500,000… and the Wolverines would be the only team under the cap at the end of April, even after the $500,000 boost in everyone’s resources! Wouldn’t that be dandy? Even a smaller 1% decline would nicely enhance the value of the Wolverines’ salary cap space.
But we don’t use average (mean) salaries as our salary cap yardstick. We use median TEAM salaries. Our cap is set at 75% of the median MLB team salary. This year, according to BP, the median team salary is $132,548,946, halfway between #15 Cleveland ($134,303,266) and Texas ($130,794,626). 75% of that is $99,411,705.50. Rounded off to the nearest $250,000, that puts us at $99,500,000 — and increase of 2.84% over last year’s Opening Day cap, which we were laboring under until now.
So write that down somewhere: the salary cap for 2018 is $99,500,000. We’ve all gotten a $2,750,000 boost in our budgets.