FanPost

Bringing up Danny Santana is a huge deal (and not why you think)



So the Red Sox world is largely assuming Danny Santana will be promoted to the major league team as soon as he's ready. After all, this makes a lot of sense given the extreme struggles at the bottom of our lineup and at positions Santana excels at (namely LF and 1B, while helping at others). Given his offensive upside and the complete lack of production at those positions so far, surely that's the big deal VLTC is talking about, right? Well, that could be a big deal, but it's not the one i'm taking about here.

Purchasing the contract of Santana ($1.75M base w/ up to another $1M in incentives) is a big deal because of payroll, the luxury tax, and the trade deadline. These are nuanced topics that some of you may not really bother yourself with, but let me try to briefly explain. First, let's look at our current payroll, tracked in real time by yours truly. I argue I track payroll as precisely as anyone doing so publicly, as I go down to individual number of service days of every player ever to touch the 40-man roster. I also model IL usage based on historical patterns. So here it is the best Payroll estimate for the season as of today (May 7th) assuming absolutely nothing changes (and before a Santana promotion):

Red Sox 2021 Projected Payroll

Projected payroll if Sox make no moves other than typical IL usage (pre-Santana)

We've actually had a relatively healthy season so far, so the amount of available cash we have has actually grown a little bit, now a bit over $2M to spend before hitting the luxury tax. The big hidden assumption in this discussion is that the Sox intend to stay under the luxury tax threshold. If they instead decide to go over, none of this matters. But for these purposes, we'll assume they are staying under $210M.

So what does that mean, and why does Santana matter? Well, if Santana is called up soon, the majority of his $1.75M base salary will apply to our payroll. He is a 5+ year veteran, which means he cannot be optioned and once on the major league team, we owe him the rest of his prorated salary (likely to be up to $1.5M) even if we cut him later. Not to mention his $1M in possible incentives (details not published yet, to my knowledge). That means if and when we promote Santana, we're eating nearly all of our available payroll under the "cap".

And that's assuming a normal amount of injuries. Remember, every time we use the IL, that player keeps earning their major league salary, while their replacement (presumably from the minors) gets promoted TO a major league salary. That means the more IL you use, the larger your payroll gets. This also means that your payroll is never 100% knowable! So you always need a buffer in case you end up with a lot of injuries.

Does this mean we should hold off on promoting Santana? After all, it may limit you a little more come the trade deadline. But we are already pretty limited there if we're going to stay under the cap. It also puts us dangerously close to "accidentally" going over the cap by just a bit if too many players hit their performance bonuses and/or we have too many injuries.

In the end, I don't think we should hesitate to promote Santana if they think it's an upgrade. It does make you want to be absolutely sure he's an upgrade that you intend to keep around all year, but I'd prefer to err on the upgrade over payroll. The big wrinkle in the decision is that Santana has an opt-out if he's not promoted by mid-May (exact date not known publicly, to my knowledge). That means you can't draw this out too much longer. But you probably don't want to delay anyway, given the current pace of Cordero, Dalbec, and Renfroe.