Braves general manager Alex Anthopoulos conducted an end-of-season media session with reporters on Friday morning. Most notably, the GM indicated he expected player payroll to increase going into next year. A rising payroll doesn’t mean the Braves will be especially active in free agency as the club already has a lot of internal commitments.
“It’s gone up each year that I’ve been here,” Anthopoulos said ( link via Gabe Burns of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ). “I know it’s not going to go down, I expect it to rise, but to what level, we’ll spend the offseason going through that. I view it Opening Day to Opening Day, because in-season things come up.
...
Is it a bottomless pit? Is it unlimited? Of course not. But every year we’ve set a new Braves high from a payroll standpoint. .
.. We will be going up, I just can’t give you the amount.
” According to the calculations at Cot’s Baseball Contracts , the Braves entered the 2024 season with around $223M in player salaries. Their estimated luxury tax number was much higher. A team’s tax figure is calculated based on the average annual values of their contracts, leading to a higher tax number than raw payroll for an Atlanta team that has a lot of backloaded extensions.
Cot’s estimated the Braves’ tax hit around $279M, though Anthopoulos confirmed shortly after the trade deadline that Atlanta was narrowly below the $277M threshold that marks the third tier of penalization. It’s the second straight yea.
