AL Central 2020 Balance Sheets

I know this is going to shock some of yous (this is Bridgeport) and probably not shock others, but your pal the BeefLoaf is an Accountant, that’s right, I’m a fucking bean counter. Not like Ben Affleck in that movie (I actually didn’t even see that movie, I didn’t want to get upset that they fuck up the Debit’s and Credit’s and the MACRS depreciation, fucking hollywood assholes!!), but a legit, real life accountant. In that respect, sometimes I like to just create a balance sheet to see what I think is going on, and since I love the White Sox and they have to battle on the regular with the rest of the AL Central, let’s take a look at this shit…..Accounting style.

ASSET – 2020 W/L RECORD

Let’s take a look at the AL Central teams’ rankings in total, for this ranking, and for the next asset ranking, lowest score is the best score, ie, 1 is BEST (that would be the Dodgers, as they had the most wins) and 30 would be the WORST (that would go to the Pirates…marone they were bad!!). Let’s see how the AL Central did?

Twins – 4th (tied with Athletics)

White Sox – 6th (tied with Cleveland Baseball Team & Braves)

Cleveland Baseball Team – 6th (tied with White Sox & Braves)

Royals – 20th (tied with Mets, Rockies, Angels & Nationals)

Tigers – 28th

In theory that’s how your major league team sits today, this is highly imperfect though, some teams are losing free agents, some teams had significant injuries to their team that effected the year’s performance, we get all that, but this is just a quick snap shot of what happened. A FUCKING BALANCE SHEET!!!! AS I SAID!

ASSET – CURRENT FARM RANKING (POST 2020 SEASON)

Up next is Farm Rankings, ie, the minor league club. Now this sort of thing is a lot more subjective than Win / Loss record so take it with a grain of salt. Also, I’ll choose to use FanGraphs THE BOARD for these rankings for two reasons. 1) They update it nearly real time, meaning as someone graduates the person gets removed from a team’s list and the ranking is refactored. 2) The crew there denotes an expected dollar value of the ranked prospects for each team, which to me is pretty cool and makes it easier for the accountant in me to understand wtf is going on. CHECK THEM OUT HERE.

Tigers – 3rd (GFY Chorizy)

Cleveland Baseball Team – 6th

Twins – 11th

Royals – 14th

White Sox – 19th

Now this doesn’t look that great for our White Sox when you think about the fact that A) Most of their young talent is just graduating from this list and B) the difference between them at 19 and the Twins at 11 is basically like 1 player of note, you realize that it’s not that big of a fucking deal. The Cleveland Baseball Team and the Tigers have pretty good farms.

LIABILITY – 2021 PAYROLL

For this exercise, I shall use Spotrac, which is imperfect, particularly because there are options available to each of these teams that they can decline which would lower their payrolls heading into this off-season and so each team probably has an artificially high payroll and although all of those amounts won’t be the same in the end, there is enough homogeneity that we can use this as a proxy. I don’t often talk in these pages about the thriftiness of the White Sox owner, that’s mostly because I don’t have anything creative to add that yous don’t already say on the twitters or in the blogs, just know, I’m witchu!. Anyways, this are bass-ackwards, the lower your rank the better (for now) because in theory you haz more money to add to your team.

Tigers – 26th (GFY Chorizy)

Royals – 23rd

Cleveland Baseball Team – 20th

Twins – 17th

White Sox – 14th

Other than the Tigers, these teams are all a bunch of boners that won’t spend anyways, so seeing these rankings doesn’t worry me much. I’d die if the Cleveland Baseball Team somehow had a top 10 payroll. I think it would take some secret BitCoin mines popping up under their fucking stadium or some shit.

In closing, I think from this high level balance sheet approach to looking at the AL Central, I am far less concerned with the 2021 Twins than I previously had been and I’m far more concerned with the 2022 and beyond Tigers. Half of the money the Tigers owe in payroll in 2021 is to Miguel Cabrera (LOL!), but if they decide to start spending pizza money again, they could be a burr in our fucking saddle as the White Sox jump with both feet through their contention window.

-BeefLoaf