30 clubs · 9 over the tax line · oldest club sheet
The Business Page
What thirty clubs pay, and what they got for it. A salary is a lagging number — it was set last winter, on last season’s results, and it cannot move until the next one. Everything else on this site measures what a hitter is doing tonight. This section is where those two clocks are put side by side.
The collective bargaining agreement expires
59 days
11:59pm ET, 1 December 2026. The owners have proposed a $245.3M cap and a $171.2M floor; the union has asked to move the tax line from $244.0M to $300M and the minimum salary to $1.5M. None of that is a rule, all of it was reported on 21 July 2026, and this section will not print any of it as if it were the CBA. What is in force is the $244.0M line, and 9 clubs are over it.
Every door
The board, the record the money bought, and the ways to check the arithmetic.
The Payroll →
All thirty clubs against the $244M tax line — and against the cap and floor the owners proposed in July, which are not rules and are marked as proposals. Plus MP/MW: what each club actually pays for a win it did not get for free.
The Signal Gap →
The flagship. Every qualified hitter ranked twice inside his own service cohort — by what his club pays him, and by what our engine measures off his batted balls. The distance between the two is the number, and it contains no WAR at all.
Bargains and albatrosses →
The Signal Gap in dollars. Sort a service cohort by salary, read that list at the rank our engine gives a hitter, and the difference from what he is actually paid is the bargain — or the albatross. Nobody is paid the implied figure, and the page says so before it prints a row.
A second set of books →
Every contract here is read twice, by two publishers who do not talk to each other. On all but a handful of the comparable deals they agree to the dollar. This is the short list that does not — both figures, both terms, both dates, and no adjudication from us.
Deferred money →
The most misunderstood number in baseball contracts, printed plainly: salary a club agreed to pay years after it was earned, per contract and per club, with the year each check comes due. It is why a $700 million contract counts as $46 million a year against the tax.
Since Opening Day →
Every other board here is a snapshot. This one is a move: where all thirty clubs started in March against where they sit now — who added, who cut, and the ones that cut cash while adding tax. It carries no opinion about whether any of them was right.
The Standings →
What the money bought. Every club's record, with run differential — the signal under it — and a door through to everyone we hold on the radar.
The Card Pulse →
The other market on this site. A card price is a market fact and never an engine signal, which is the same rule a salary is held to here.
The vocabulary →
Cash payroll against CBT payroll, room, the tax line, pythagorean and marginal wins, MP/MW — every term this section prints, defined in plain language. Nothing is printed here that is not defined there.
The board as JSON →
The whole thing, free and unkeyed, including every figure's source, its clock, and whether we took it off the sheet or worked it out ourselves.
What this section is for
Every other site in this category divides someone else’s WAR by a salary. We do not have a better version of that and we are not going to ship one. What we have is a leading number: EV95, contact value and the luck gap, measured off batted balls every night. A club pays for what a hitter did. We measure what he is doing.
The board that prints the difference is the Signal Gap: every qualified hitter’s pay rank against his engine rank, inside his own service cohort. The same distance in dollars is bargains and albatrosses: what a cohort actually pays at the rank we give a man, against what he is actually paid. A filed, timestamped call on a contract comes after those. It is not linked here because it does not exist yet, and this site does not link to pages it has not built.
All of those are snapshots. The one board here that is not is since Opening Day: where all thirty clubs started in March against where they sit now. It took its Door on 2026-08-05, the day it was built, and it exists only because a second payroll source publishes an Opening Day figure that Cot’s does not.
One rule holds all of them: pre-arbitration, arbitration and free-agent players are never ranked on one cost axis. A pre-arb win costs about a tenth of a free-agent win, so any leaderboard that mixes them is a service-time ranking with a dollar sign on it. Three regimes, three cohorts, always.
Fever Baseball · Contract figures from Cot’s