With Buyouts Coming, Key to Understanding Brewers Payroll Picture is Breaking Free from One-Number Thinking

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Dave Kallmann / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

By Thursday, MLB teams and the players with whom they've struck past deals that include options for 2026 have to make their decisions about whether to exercise or decline those options. For the Milwaukee Brewers, this fall, that means five dilemmas—none of them especially difficult, and four of them being mutual options on which the player also has a choice to make.

Rhys Hoskins, Brandon Woodruff, Danny Jansen and Jose Quintana are all impending free agents, but their contracts each contain mutual options. The Brewers use those options to manage their payroll situation, pushing payments out beyond the season in which a player is actually with the team. Fewer than 10% of contracts that include mutual options result in both sides exercising their option; the player nearly always becomes a free agent instead. That means a buyout being paid to the player, which is effectively part of their salary for the previous year(s) of the deal but acts as a miniature deferral for the team.

In the cases of Hoskins and Woodruff, those deferrals are particularly extreme. Hoskins will get a $4-million buyout when the Brewers turn down their side of an $18-million option for 2026, but that payment won't be made until Feb. 1, 2026. The Brewers will get another quarterly disbursal from the league's revenue-sharing pool before then, in addition to having some of the money generated by their playoff run this fall flow in—including what figure to be strong ticket sales for 2026.

Woodruff has a $20-million mutual option for next season, which the Brewers will probably exercise but which Woodruff will almost certainly decline. That's because the option comes with a $10-million buyout, so he'd only need to make more than that via free agency to make turning down his side of the option wise. For the Brewers, though, that's no problem. They'll pay $5 million on the buyout on Jan. 15, and another $5 million on Jul. 15. From a cash-flow perspective, Milwaukee will have an easy time absorbing that buyout, thanks to the way they've spread the payments. 

The $2-million buyout on a $15-million mutual option with Quintana will be paid more or less immediately, as will the $500,000 on a $12-million option with Jansen. However, when the Crew traded for Jansen in July, they got $1.6 million from the Rays, which covered about half of his salary for the balance of the year. Milwaukee will surely decline their option on William Contreras, returning him to the arbitration pipeline, and they'll owe just $100,000 to Contreras when they do so.

The money on each of these deals sloshes, from one year to the next and across the offseason. It can make things difficult, if you're inclined toward the traditional ways of tabulating payroll for big-league teams. For most clubs, fans and analysts default to a one-number annual payroll summary. That can be the 26-man Opening Day payroll, or the full-season 40-man figure, or the one calculated for the purposes of the competitive-balance tax, which averages players' earnings across all the guaranteed years of their current contracts. It's often best to use the second of those three for teams like the Brewers, who never get especially close to the CBT threshold. It's usually important to use the CBT number for the teams who pay it, or often flirt with the line.

In the specific case of the Brewers, though, the best approach is a much thornier one. The Crew move money around too deftly, even within the annual baseball revenue cycle, for any of those lone numbers to paint anything close to a complete picture. They're masters of creating flexibility, and they use that to make nimbler offseason moves than a typical team with their financial fundamentals otherwise would. As frustrating as it can be, it's best not to act as though any one number sums up the Brewers' spending for a given year, the same way one number can sum up what the Cubs or the Dodgers or the Pirates spend. 

That doesn't mean fans should assume the team is spending enough and give them the benefit of the doubt. On the contrary, the best assumption is that the club can spend at least a bit more than they currently do, and as they enjoy the fruits of their playoff success in the middle of a fecund winning window, the expectation should be that they spend more to supplement a World Series contender. It's just a cautionary note. While we should urge the team to spend more, we also have to acknowledge the beneficial complexity of their approach to spending.

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[BrewerFan]

Yup. It's that time of year. Time for people... mostly on Twitter("X" sounds like an adult website) yell for the Brewers to sign... Bichette or Tucker... "cheap" Mark Attanasio should open his wallet... etc...

 

This year, I really don't care. It's not an indifference towards the Brewers, I'm pretty content with the exact team we have under team control next year. I'd LIKE to see if they could do something with Woodruff. I'd LIKE Kyle Finnegan. I'd LIKE Caleb Ferguson as a LHed reliever who gets GBs and soft contact. 

But... I really think you run it back with this exact team, you have Vaughn a full year, some guys who can fill in like Lara, maybe Mitchell is healthy... also be nice if someone like Pratt can force the issue, but even at SS, I think Joey Ortiz will be a 700+ OPS guy. His BABIP should be higher than .260 by about 40-50 points...70 points if he's lucky. 

[Michael Trzinski]

I believe there should be a much simpler salary structure, and I hope to post an article that states my ideas in the coming weeks. In my world, gone are the long-term contracts (4+ years), guaranteed contracts, and deferred money. 

It's gotten way too complicated...

[wallus]

I'd like the team to make a trade for someone that might be a little overpaid but still a productive player. I'm not seeing a lot of realistic free agents (especially positional players) that will help us a lot.

[Frisbee Slider]

I assume the expiring collective bargaining agreement makes Milwaukee more risk averse to committing long term money this offseason.

Unless,…every team becomes risk averse and the Brewers sense an inefficiency. 🤷‍♂️

[Telemachus Rafaelidys]

Fecund 👍 

[Matthew Trueblood]

17 hours ago, Michael Trzinski said:

I believe there should be a much simpler salary structure, and I hope to post an article that states my ideas in the coming weeks. In my world, gone are the long-term contracts (4+ years), guaranteed contracts, and deferred money. 

It's gotten way too complicated...

Heh. I hear you... but there's NO chance of anything remotely like a limit on contract length or the elimination of guaranteed contracts. I'm not actually sure how the latter would make things less complicated, anyway, but at any rate, it's several folds of the space-time continuum from becoming a possibility. The owners aren't even pushing to get rid of those; it's not an issue that will even land on the table during negotiations.

I could see some very lenient limits being placed on deferred money in the next CBA, but even that's a long shot. Sorry, Michael; these ideas aren't gonna get anywhere. 

[Anton B]

4 hours ago, Matthew Trueblood said:

Heh. I hear you... but there's NO chance of anything remotely like a limit on contract length or the elimination of guaranteed contracts. I'm not actually sure how the latter would make things less complicated, anyway, but at any rate, it's several folds of the space-time continuum from becoming a possibility. The owners aren't even pushing to get rid of those; it's not an issue that will even land on the table during negotiations.

I could see some very lenient limits being placed on deferred money in the next CBA, but even that's a long shot. Sorry, Michael; these ideas aren't gonna get anywhere. 

I wish I would have a solution to MLB baseball regarding teams to be on an equal level when it comes to salary.  I know players don't want a cap, but in all honesty how can the Brewers, Pirates, Royals, etc be able to compete with the big boys??  I don't want to see a lock out in 2027, but the way it's going it sure looks like it.  

One of my ideas is have Mark Attanasio invest around the stadium.  Find another way to create revenue.  Green Bay has done it and so has the Bucks.  I felt as tax payers we have lived our end of the barging now its time for ownership to live up to theirs.  The Brewers have been competitive and as a fan I am so thankful of it, but we just need something to put us over the hump and be able to compete for World Series titles.

 

[Michael Trzinski]

On 11/3/2025 at 11:42 AM, Matthew Trueblood said:

Sorry, Michael; these ideas aren't gonna get anywhere. 

In the 'Just for Fun' category of your favorite baseball website, coming soon...
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