The One-Hitter White Sox 2021 payroll

This is the One-Hitter, don’t for get to exhale.

I’ve written about Payrolls in the past, particularly how the average World Series winner’s payroll from 2012-2018 was a whopping 32% above league average. WOW!! Just eyeballin’ the 2019 and 2020 champs payrolls, me thinks that trend is still quite live. Let’s check out the 2021 White Sox payroll.

Oh shit, for as much hand wringing as we have done about the White Sox spending habits….not only are they above average, but a solid 14% above it. But wait, the off-season is far from fucking over. Let’s try and project where this lands.

Per Fangraphs Depth Charts, they project 90.8 fWar out there for purchase in the free agent market. That seems like too much to me, but let’s just go with it for now as we don’t have any better information and this is a fucking estimate. Now, back in the day we used to use $8M per 1 fWar as a proxy for salary, but in more recent years the average has slid down due to teams paying a premium for getting multiple wins from a single player in a single year and doing the opposite for the useful player projected to give them 1.25 fWar or whatever. So we’ll use $5M per 1 fWar in this calculation. (so 90 fWar x $5M = $450M?) GO!!!

Oof, a little more sobering, but still slightly above average. Err, wait, the White Sox will probably spend a little of that right?

Let’s go with Josh, add $10M to the White Sox payroll as part of that $450M. $130.5M payroll / $116.9M average payroll = ~12% above average. In order to get to 32% above average payroll (using my ham-fisted calc), they’d need to get about $154M. About 1 George Springer. About 1 Marcell Ozuna. So if you’ve been a White Sox fan sitting at home thinking, damn, they just feel 1 player short from being an awesome team. Yea.

-BeefLoaf