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

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.