Welcome to this year’s edition of putting on your Angels GM hat and building this ballclub. The Angels are coming off a franchise worst record of 63-99 and in need of help all over the diamond. But, thanks to adding some arms at the trade deadline and some good first round picks in recent years might actually have some help internally. The staff will start rolling out our writeups soon, but as always we want this to be a group activity.
Here are the ground rules for the series:
Arte has said payroll will increase from last year’s $193 million. We’ll take him at his word to a degree but not expect anything crazy so the payroll limit is $200 million.
Current payroll is projected to be $168 million after the Jorge Soler trade. That figure from Spotrac includes projected salaries for the arbitration eligible players. You can add payroll room by non-tendering an arbitration eligible player. As we are using the Spotrac numbers for payroll, please subtract their projected salary in the event you non-tender or trade an arbitration eligible player.
For top 50 free agents, use the salaries on either the FanGraphs projection piece or the MLBTR projection piece. You can mix and match to make your math work if need be.
For free agents that fall outside of the top 50, be realistic. If you can cite a contract for a similar player in your piece that is a bonus.
Make trades as realistic as possible. Baseballtradevalues.com isn’t perfect but it is the best third party site to use for trade scenarios. Note this year they have moved to a pay model but if you type in your player’s name on the Trade Board search tool you can find trades made by other members and see your player’s trade value.
So, start rosterbating and let’s see what you got.
