This post could’ve been titled “Reassessing the Giants’ payroll situation for 2026” as a sequel to this post from earlier in the offseason, but it’s less interesting than the truth, which is that, based
on what’s publicly known about the team’s expenses, the San Francisco Giants have committed to the largest Baseball Operations budget in franchise history.
Previously, I’d pegged that total number to be around $250 million when you take into consideration all the items that must be covered in Baseball Operations. That figure includes the major league payroll, but also so much more that — whether fans choose to accept this or not — weighs on how the team conducts business in free agency every year. Reporting on Tyler Mahle’s deal indicates that he’s guaranteed $10 million in 2026 with additional incentives built in that could increase the value to $13 million. Whether it’s $10 million or $13 million, that puts the Giants’ actual payroll — not the Competitive Balance Tax payroll, which is simply the average annual value of all contracts on the books — at $175,685,944 as projected by Cot’s MLB Contracts.
It nearly goes without saying that the majority of fans want the team to spend more money on payroll, if not to close the gap with the Dodgers (which is impossible) then to at least make the team as great as it can possibly be. For their part, the Giants have tempered expectations with discussions of fiscal responsibility and servicing shareholders while also being opportunistic where possible; and, Major League Baseball gave a gift to them with the third Wild Card, a playoff participation trophy for the team that can’t spend at a level that makes them perennial division contenders or draft well enough to give them a core of homegrown All-Stars. Remarkably, the Giants have managed to be both types of teams over the past decade.
Hiring Farhan Zaidi to run Baseball Operations was a good decision on paper because the promise of the premise was that they could better utilize their decent resources to either overperform projections or field a great team at a restrained spending level. The Giants managed to do neither of those things during his tenure and now they’re back to their post-2014 phase of wheel-spinning. Meanwhile, with a simple thing like inflation — both in the actual US dollar and the cost of a win — the Giants have had to raise their spending just to maintain their tepid planning. And it’s this simple reality that probably explains this fairly modest increase in their spending.
Well, okay, that and a few one-time expenses I’m sure they’ll never put themselves in a position to have to pay again. Let’s go through what we know about the Giants’ spending and compare that to the previous years.
What’s known
Major League Payroll — $175,685,944
A couple of important things here:
- This is a projection of the team’s year end payroll as determined by Cot’s MLB Contracts and it’s based not only on what a player’s 2026 salary will be (Willy Adames: $13,142,857), but also the amount that the team might pay for players called up as injury replacements or will pay to those on the 40-man roster but in the minors, or are pre-arbitration players on the major league roster.
- This would not be a record figure. According to Cot’s, the Giants ended the 2025 season with a 40-man payroll of $178,452,945, which was 14th in the sport. In 2024, they were 10th in MLB despite running the largest payroll in team history at $210,889,334. That got them a record of 80-82, by the way. The previous high was in 2018, when they spent $209,569,206 on a roster that went 73-89.
Now, this is the number that fans should be complaining about when they want the team to boost payroll. Usually, fans want the team to at least spend to the first luxury tax threshold ($244 million in 2026), but they’re already at $206,322,170 when it comes to that — at least, according to Cot’s, which we’ll examine more in a moment.
You’ll notice there’s a gap of about $28 million between the two payroll figures. That, to me, is a clear indication the team has setup a major league payroll budget that’s well short of the Competitive Balance Tax most years.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but annually, it creates a self-imposed obstacle the team must decide to either overcome or obey. At times, it can be very frustrating to consider the team’s value, its ownership group, its location in the country and its place in the market and then ignore all that to accept that it’s reasonable to stick to the same budget year after year.
Competitive Balance Tax payroll — $206,322,170*
Officially, the “Major League Payroll” as I’ve called it is technically labeled the “Actual Club Payroll” in the Collective Bargaining Agreement or the Labor Relations Payroll according to MLBPA. It’s just important to understand that there are two payroll figures to keep track of and, hopefully, you see how it could be advantageous for team officials to hop between the labels when appropriate in a public setting giving interviews.
But beyond knowing that the Giants will be paying ~$28 million less in actual money on their major league roster than what the Competitive Balance Tax (CBT) figure indicates, the CBT still does contain line items that the Giants will pay.
The CBT figure includes the following mandatory expenditures for all 30 teams: player health care costs and a $1,666,667 contribution to the pre-arbitration bonus pool established in the last CBA. The annual health care costs are only estimated by Cot’s but the Associated Press reports that in 2025 the exact figure was “$17,209,029 per club for benefits and extended benefits, which include items such as health and pension benefits; club medical costs; insurance; workman’s compensation, payroll, unemployment and Social Security taxes; spring training allowances; meal and tip money; All-Star game expenses; travel and moving expenses; postseason pay; and college scholarships.”
Cot’s tends to estimate about $500,000 more each year than the last, which worked in 2025 with their $17.5 million projection but won’t in 2026 as the typical workplace health plan premium will see an increase of 6-7%. So, let’s go with 7% and beat Cot’s $18,000,000 estimate with $18,413,661.03. We could go to $18.5 million if we wanted, too, because the cost of everything has gone up over the past year, but for now we’ll go with that. Between the bonus pool and health care, that $20,080,328.03 in mandatory spending.
The CBT figure also includes any retained salary. So, the $1,875,000 the Giants will pay the Angels for Jorge Soler is on the ledger for the purposes of calculating the luxury tax threshold. Altogether, that’s $21,955,328.03 on top of the average annual value of the major league contracts. I asterisked the header for this section just because of that tweak to the health care projection (which I could still be wrong about!) and that gives the Giants a projected CBT heading into Opening Day of $206,735,831.03.
That number isn’t actually important for this exercise, but those mandatory expenditures definitely are.
Other bonus pools — $19,114,500
It probably would’ve been cleaner to add the prearbitration bonus pool contribution to this group, but there’s a good reason why I didn’t: these next two pools do not factor into the league’s Competitive Balance Tax calculation. They do, however, hit the team’s budget.
The international bonus pool kicks in on January 15, 2026. Because the Giants signed Willy Adames, they lost $1 million from their pool, knocking them into the group with the lowest pool figure: $5,440,000.
The amateur draft bonus pool should not be considered bittersweet or a double-edged sword, but I did chuckle in the moment wondering how the team was going to budget for it. They lucked into the #4 overall pick thanks to the draft lottery and that comes with not only a good chance at landing a great talent, it necessarily enhances their total bonus pool, going from $8,403,300 in 2025 to $13,674,500 for 2026.
Deferrals & buyouts — $25,000,000
This is the shock to the system that the Giants have to budget around. It hurts that their pitching development pipeline didn’t pan out in 2025 because it put them in a position where they had to explore the free agent pitching market and pay what’s now market rate for back of the rotation arms ($10-$12 million). Not saying that it was going to be easy to replace Blake Snell’s value, but it hurts that someone in the group of Hayden Birdsong, Carson Whisenhunt, Jordan Hicks, Kyle Harrison, or even Kai-Wei Teng couldn’t step in as an average (2.0 fWAR) starter, because paying one of them the minimum for 2/3 of Snell’s 2024 value would’ve made it a lot easier to stomach having to pay him $17 million on January 15th. That deferral is infamous.
Then there’s Buster Posey’s vote of confidence in Bob Melvin that converted into a $4 million “go away” fee. Add to that the $3 million buyout the team had to pay Tennessee to land Tony Vitello and that’s a $24 million boulder rolling after Buster Posey and Zack Minasian that they helped set into motion.
Oh wait. There’s also the $1 million that’s owed to Mark Melancon as part of his deal structure that will see him get this payment on January 15th through 2028. So, this line item is actually $25 million.
Tony Vitello’s salary — $3,500,000
Again, this is all the publicly available information pooled together just to get a sense of where the Baseball Operations budget might be. When I’ve done this in the past, the final sum has usually pointed towards $250 million being the total operational budget for our favorite squadron. However, that’s always been open to debate — though, not for the reason ornery fans might think.
The unknowns
Coaching staff cost
It’s hard to know just how much coaches make and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to blanket the group with a six-figure range. The Giants had 14 coaches in 2024 and 11 in 2025, and we know the team committed to steering away from the phalanx of coaches deployed by the previous front office. Staffing up with millionaires (Pat Burrell, Matt Williams) also helps keep costs down a bit, too.
And that’s just on the major league side. The org also has roving instructors and coaches throughout the minors.
Scouting department
Even with the culling of their scouting department, this is still a cost with domestic and international reach. Have the Giants started to have more success internationally because they shifted some resources there during the last front office’s tenure?
Administrative staff
Posey, Minasian, and co. all have some kind of staff support. The front office water cooler or coffee maker doesn’t refresh automatically. There’s also the marketing department and ticket office. Those special advisors probably don’t get very much beyond stipends and park perks because, again, they’re already millionaires, but every dollar spent here or in any of these areas I’m talking about right now is a dollar that doesn’t go towards the major league roster. You also couldn’t run an organization without support staff.
Player development
I was just going mention the $50 million Papago Park project here because I didn’t know the financing behind it (do they pay $3 million on it every year or something?), but there are also things like food & beverage, iPads, computers, IT, training facilities, etc. that go into this. It’s the one area of the budget that could always use some fresh allocation if only because the results have been largely lackluster over the past decade.
Stadium personnel
Now, because the park holds events year round, there are definitely the baseball-specific group (of which I’m including the clubbies and groundskeepers) and non-baseball group. I also don’t know for sure how either group gets paid. Does every dollar spent at a Giants game get divvied up 70/30 team/park and out of that 30% comes the pay for the stadium workers (non-food division)?
We know from the Spanish language broadcasting story that the team nests budgets in specific revenue streams and so it’s hard to know who from this list gets paid directly from the team out of the same pool of money that flows into the major league payroll and investors’ pockets. And, by the way, there’s a pool of money that’s only for investors and that’s why those fans crying for a salary cap are being pennywise and pound foolish. You can’t have a cap without a real revenue split, and if fans think they can figure out the “difference” between baseball revenue and non-baseball revenue they’re kidding themselves and wasting people’s time.
I digress!
Travel costs
Those flights and hotels don’t pay for themselves!
Dividends
Okay, that thing I labeled a digression before? It wasn’t.
The Giants have 31 named investors as of this writing and I can’t believe the investor agreement doesn’t guarantee a floor for the return. There’s simply too much money in Major League Baseball and Bay Area real estate for profitability to be a question mark year to year (barring a global pandemic, of course). Now, sports fans should never root for their team’s owner to pocket lots of money every year, but I have to acknowledge that a solid majority of fans do, just as a very loud group of fans only perceive players as assets who need to be strenuously evaluated and transacted in a way that maintains or plusses “surplus value.” I’m guilty of being one of those surplus value dumb-dumbs, by the way. It took me way too long to understand that the surplus value was going to the ownership group and not the team.
This is, obviously, an area we’ll never know about and aren’t supposed to, but I figure it’s worth mentioning here because it obviously has some bearing on how the team spends money on the roster. Whatever this figure is impacts the Baseball Operations budget, because that one chews up the money coming in by design.
Okay, maybe one day we’ll get a story about Buster Posey foregoing a return to help pay for Tyler Mahle or something.
So, to recap:
- MLB Payroll (not the CBT payroll that is the basis for the luxury tax): $175,685,944
- Mandatory costs (retained salary, pre-arb bonus pool contribution, health care): $20,080,328.03
- Amateur draft & international signings bonus pools: $19,114,500
- Deferrals & buyouts: $25,000,000
- Tony Vitello’s salary: $3,500,000
That all adds up to $243,380,772.03. That’s ahead of the $235,656,495 they spent in 2024 and the publicly known Baseball Ops expenses. It’s a 3.22% increase — about the rate of inflation over the same span. Unless we hear about layoffs or some sort of administrative restructuring, it stands to reason the baseball group will need to greenlight more than $250 million to satisfy the org’s operational needs in 2026.
So, this shouldn’t be read as going “all in” or anything drastic. It’s just the cost of doing regular business next year. And, in an offseason that doesn’t feature a lot of exciting free agents, it’s the safe play. The Tatsuya Imai deal is right in Greg Johnson’s preferred range for a pitching contract and as the Houser and Mahle contracts show, the Giants know that the market rate for a good starter has increased. But why spend $20 million on one question mark when it could go to two Maybes? I don’t agree with that, but I also can’t imagine the team boosting its budget to acquire that sort of player.
On the other hand, this increase is probably temporary and, therefore, easy to justify to the investors, especially the newer ones who might become concerned if the team suddenly raises payroll by $50 million. The Giants won’t owe Blake Snell, Bob Melvin, or the University of Tennessee any money next year. Still, if the ownership group wants to surprise us with a big free agent acquisition — Bo Bichette? Kyle Tucker? — or another big trade a la Devers? — Brendan Donovan? Kodai Senga? — I would welcome it.
