MLB Notebook: On the Red Sox' offseason payroll challenge; expansion/realignment talk

Late this past week, the Red Sox Baseball Operations staff was still waiting on word from ownership regarding the club’s payroll budget for the 2018 season.

For now, with free agents frozen until after the World Series and trade talk on hold until the GM Meetings in the middle of next month, the number of purely theoretical. But eventually, there needs to be a plan – and a number – in place.

The CBT (competitive bargain tax, more commonly known as the luxury tax) number for 2018 will be $197 million, and from here, it seems self-evident that the Red Sox will be forced into going over that benchmark – if they want to make any improvement to a team which suffered its second-straight quick playoff exit.

The Red Sox already have $115.5 million committed to six players: David Price, Hanley Ramirez, Rick Porcello, Dustin Pedroia, Craig Kimbrel and Chris Sale. (The latter two have club options, but it’s obvious the Red Sox will pick up both).

They also owe Pablo Sandoval $18.455 million and are staring at approximately $53 million in salaries for 15 salary-arbitration cases.

That brings the running total to more than $186 million. Add in another $3 million or so for a handful of players with fewer than three years of service time and insurance and benefits costs, and the Sox are already right up against the $197 million threshold – without adding a single new player to the roster.

If the Sox want to add a significant power bat to their lineup, plus some starting pitching depth (with questions marks attached to Eduardo Rodriguez, Price and Steven Wright) and an alternative to Dustin Pedroia to protect them against a surgical procedure that could force him to miss a significant part of 2018, they’ll need authorization to spend another $30 million or more in 2018.

It helps that the Red Sox stayed under the CBT threshold in 2017, allowing them to reset their tax rate should they go over in future years.

For 2018, the Red Sox can spend up to $217 million and have the amount of money spent between $197 million and $217 million taxed at a rate of 20 percent. Should they go over $217 million, they would be further assessed a surtax of an additional 12 percent.

But not even the $217 million threshold gives the Red Sox much wiggle room. That would allow for one big contract of $20 million or so, for, say, J.D. Martinez, but wouldn’t provide enough in the budget to also retain Eduardo Nunez, or address starting pitching depth.

(Of course, the Red Sox could further save some money by non-tendering some of their arbitration-eligibles. Reliever Robbie Ross Jr., who is scheduled to earn $2 million, would be one such candidate. They could also trade someone off the major league roster and save additional salary).

Beyond the financial penalties faced, the club would also risk other assessments after the 2018 season, such as having to give up a better draft pick after signing a qualified free agent, or getting a lower draft pick for themselves should they lose a qualified free agent.

Still, the history of this current ownership group is that it commits to more resources after a series of disappointing seasons, and while the Sox are coming off back-to-back division titles, their last two October stall-outs would seem to suggest a bigger payroll is in the offing.

For a team with a committed and loyal fan base, accustomed to paying for some of the highest ticket prices in the game, that’s as it should be.

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Baseball hasn’t expanded in almost 20 years – it welcomed the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays for the 1998 season – but suddenly, there are whispers that MLB could add two more teams in the not-so-distant future.

Montreal and Portland are the two cities most often mentioned as potential expansion cities. Such a move would give baseball 32 teams, and also allow for realignment and an expanded playoff.

With 32 teams, baseball could go to eight four-team divisions, or four eight-team groupings.

Highly respected writer Tracy Ringolsby, writing in Baseball America, suggested the latter, in a format which would eliminate any notion of the American League and National League.

Under Ringolsby’s play, the Red Sox would take part in a North Division, grouped with the two Canadian franchises (Montreal and Toronto), two New York teams (Yankees and Mets) along with Cleveland, Detroit and Minnesota.

Under a 156-game schedule, with one set day off every week (either Monday or Thursday), teams would play division opponents 12 times per season, for a total of 84 games. They would then face every other one of the 24 teams outside the division three times, for a total of 72, accounting for 156 games.

This means the other teams outside the division would come to Fenway only once every other year; by the same token, the Sox would visit the other non-division cities every-other season.

As for the postseason, a four-division setup would have the division champs advance to the LDS, with eight wild-card teams in one-game elimination games, competing to be the division champions’ first-round opponents.

That would give baseball six additional one-and-done games to auction off to TV without further expanding the post-season footprint.

Of course, there are obstacles, not the least of which is the loss of three home dates per franchise in the shortened schedule. But Ringolsby, who proposes all road trips be limited to two cities, contends that could be made up for by the reduction in travel outside a team’s division.

Another potential pitfall: teams like Baltimore and Tampa Bay, accustomed to nine (or 10) lucrative home dates per season with big draws like the Red Sox and Yankees, will now get only three home dates every other year with those teams.

Sure, there are issues to overcome, not the least of which is adding 50 more players who are currently not good enough to compete at the big league level.

As for effectively eliminating the leagues, such a tradition-busting move would have been antithetical under commissioner Bud Selig, but Rob Manfred has shown an admirable willingness to consider anything and everything – if it’s good for the game.

And for those who would decry a watering-down of the playoff field, the plan would result in 12-of-32 teams getting into the post-season, the same current number as the NFL, and still less than 16-out-of-30 formats in the NBA and NHL.

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Two Red Sox coaches – Carl Willis (Minnesota) and Chili Davis (San Diego) – interviewed for other positions this week and more interviews and offers may come for the likes of Gary DiSarcina, Ruben Amaro Jr., and Dana LeVangie – but the coach everyone is keeping their eye on is third base coach Brian Butterfield.

Butterfield is a New England (Maine) native and would strongly prefer to remain with the Sox. (Indications are the Sox will also strongly suggest that the new manager retain LeVangie, who has been part of the organization – as a minor league player, scout or coach – for better than 25 years).

If Butterfield is not retained, an offer from the Miami Marlins would surprise no one, given that Butterfield has ties to part-owner Derek Jeter, manager Don Mattingly and newly-installed director of player development Gary Denbo dating back to Butterfield’s time spent in the New York organization.

Interestingly, should the Red Sox job go to Brad Ausmus, Butterfield would have a connection there, too, having served as Ausmus’s first manager in pro ball.

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While the Red Sox have some work to do, things could be worse – they could be the Washington Nationals.

The Nats shocked nearly everybody Friday with the announcement that Dusty Baker would not return as manager for 2018, despite two seasons in which the Nats won two division titles in two seasons and averaged 96 wins per season.

The move reportedly went against the wishes of GM Mike Rizzo and was at the behest of the Lerner family, which owns the team.

Next year, the Nats will be on their seventh manager in 14 seasons and that kind of instability isn’t good for a franchise.

The inning that did in the Nats – the fifth inning of Game 5 of their NLDS matchup with the Cubs – included a passed ball, throwing error, catcher’s interference, and a hit batsman forcing in a run.

Just how unusual was that series of events taking place together? This unusual: research determined that those four things had never once taken place in the same half-inning in the more than 2.7 million innings that had preceded it.

When you’re experiencing something that is essentially a 1-in-2.7 million shot, you’re dealing with larger forces at work.

That sort of karma, to say nothing of three other NLDS exits in the previous five seasons, can weigh heavily on a team’s psychological well-being.

Red Sox players in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s had to answer for Bill Buckner, Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone. Nationals’ players will face the same line of questioning unless/until the franchise wins it all.

That’s not a comfortable existence, especially in an era when there are more media outlets than ever searching for an angle.

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Alex Rodriguez can be delightful as a TV analyst, which should surprise no one who came across him in his career. Far more than most modern players, Rodriguez loved the game, closely paid attention to it and loved talking about it. When paired with the right partner, Rodriguez can offer informed analysis and provide keen insight.

But his fawning persona in which he pretends to be every bit the Mr. Yankee that Joe DiMaggio or Whitey Ford were, is a little much. First, he spent just a little over half his career (12 of 22 seasons) in pinstripes. And it was only a few short years ago that Rodriguez sued the Yankees in a legal dispute over an injury.

But now, on the FS1 pre- and post-game shows, Rodriguez unabashedly roots for the Yankees and tries to make funny by slipping a Yankee jacket on an unsuspecting David Ortiz.

There’s made-for-TV schtick…. and then there’s the unctuousness that turned off so many teammates and opponents alike over the years.

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People around the Indians are still trying to digest their ALDS loss to the Yankees. One of the mysteries was the ineffectiveness of ace Corey Kluber, who failed to get out of the fifth inning in either of his two starts. Kluber, who missed time earlier in the season with some lower back issues, insisted after Cleveland was eliminated that he was healthy, but the Indians noticed that the presumptive Cy Young Award-winner was frequently dropping his arm slot in his two starts, a sure sign of fatigue – or worse.