The Angels declined David Murphy‘s $7 million option for 2016 on Wednesday morning, effectively leaving the team without a real left fielder on the roster as the offseason kicks off. That’s a bit of a frightening place to be considering the team also has holes at third base and catcher as a result of free agency and another at second wrought by employing a sort of war of attrition at the keystone in 2015, but it’s not as devastating as, say, paying eight figures for your left fielder to play for a division rival. Ultimately, the financially flexibility that declining Murphy’s option provides now should far outweigh any value he might have provided later.
“Should” is the operative word there, of course, because whether it will outweigh Murphy’s potential value still hinges on a host of variables. First and foremost among those is what Arte Moreno decides to do about the luxury tax. He’s on the record saying that he’d exceed the $189 million threshold “for the right player”, but so far that player has proven to be as elusive as a profitable, quality sports journalism site. At this point “the right player” is a fiction, meaning Billy Eppler and company have to operate on the assumption of a fixed fiscal ceiling.
Accounting for salary arbitration projections, pre-arb players, and David Murphy’s $500K buyout, in addition to the eight players already under contract, we can surmise that the Angels’ luxury tax payroll for 2016 currently sits at about $164 million, give or take a few mil. That leaves roughly $25 million in luxury-tax wiggle room for additions from the open market. That maybe affords one of Justin Upton or Jason Heyward, and spotlights how important declining Murphy’s option will potentially be for the front office. Without that $6.5 million in savings and without an explicit mandate from Moreno to go past the luxury tax, the club would start the winter at a huge disadvantage by having to settle for second-tier players from the get-go. A few years ago, $18.5 million would have netted Matt Holliday or Adrian Beltre. Today, though? It might get the team David Freese and a random utility infielder. And then what? Make Murphy the full-time left fielder?
The Angels made it pretty clear in the final week of the season that they viewed Murphy as no more than a platoon player, sitting him in three of the team’s final four games in favor of the hollowed-out shell of Shane Victorino. In any other year, the club might have been willing to shell out $7 million for that kind of player. But with the self-imposed (and largely self-inflicted) financial limitations noted above, the Halos simply don’t have the means to make that work and address the needs elsewhere on the roster.
Billy Eppler certainly has his work cut out for him this winter—his ability to properly analyze and utilize his limited resources is another one of those aforementioned variables—but it’s not an impossible task. Freeing up the money needed to be involved in all levels of the market by letting David Murphy walk was a good first step. If all else fails, they can always bring him back on the cheap.
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