2025 Brewers Offseason Handbook: Breaking Down Brewers' Key Payroll and Roster Decisions

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By now, the constraints with which the small-market Brewers must always contend are achingly familiar to fans. Ownership could always elect to pour more money into the team and accept smaller profits (or even short-term losses) to change the balance between revenue and competitive prospects, but that works much better in times of secure long-term profitability. Now that Milwaukee (along with many, many other teams, most of them in the league's smaller markets) faces serious questions about the amount of money they'll make from local TV rights in the short-term future, these are not such times. Though it feels like we just emerged from the mire and madness of a failed CBA negotiation and winter-long lockout, another one could loom just around the corner.

For a mixture of those two reasons, it's likely that the Brewers will spend somewhere south of $130 million in payroll for 2025. They spent $135 million in 2023 and $133 million in 2024, and that didn't impede them, so it's far from a death knell if they trim things down to $125 million or so. Still, that will be the defining constraint for the team this winter. If that wasn't already clear, they made it so over the weekend, by waiving Colin Rea (in the hopes of clearing the $1 million obligation they would have to him upon declining his $5.5 million option for 2025) and declining their club option on Devin Williams.

We knew this would be the way of things, of course. Rhys Hoskins opted in for $18 million in 2025, an unsurprising decision after an uninspiring 2024 season. When stacked alongside the team's existing commitments to Christian Yelich and Freddy Peralta and their escalating obligations to Jackson Chourio, William Contreras and others, that creates a hefty pile of money owed. It's not prohibitive, but the team has to navigate the ramifications of acquisitions they made over previous winters, all aimed at doing exactly what they've done: winning 185 regular-season games and claiming back-to-back division championships.

So, who's owed what? Which salaries might the team move, and how much space can they create for meaningful additions? Just as importantly, because it's the other key constraint on every team's efforts to build a champion, what decisions will the front office have to make to manage the 40-man roster? Let's get granular with it.