Last season, the Angels were on FanDuel Sports Network West, owned by Main Street Sports. The company has been in a rough financial spot for a while and recently missed some payments to teams. In response, the Angels and the eight other teams who were signed with Main Street terminated their deals last month. Six of those clubs will now have their broadcasts handled by Major League Baseball itself, though the Angels are (for now) one of the holdouts.
The question going into next season, naturally, is just how much the team has available to spend, and the answer appears to be that same $211MM-$221MM range. " We anticipate payroll will remain at a similar level to last year....We're operating the club as we have for the last five or six years," Padres chairman John Seidler told the San Diego Union-Tribune's Kevin Acee and other reporters on Monday at the Winter Meetings.
Mariners general manager Justin Hollander publicly admitted a few weeks back that the club would be looking for bullpen upgrades. Adam Jude of The Seattle Times reports that Seattle plans to add two relievers and hopes to have one locked down by the end of the Winter Meetings next week. Adding a lefty is a priority and Jude lists five names they are considering, with four of them being southpaws.
If there's a correlation between spending the most money and winning a championship, I still think it's a weak correlation. Sample size of data, not very big. But they earned every bit of it. I mean, they struggled with injuries throughout the season. But they got healthy at the right time. The rotation got healthy, and when that rotation is healthy, they're tough to beat.
By the by, it appears that Alex Anthopoulos spoke to reporters yesterday. While I haven't seen a broad summary of his remarks, we have teeny-tiny snippets like: If you take it at face value, this suggests two-plus serious-money additions at key positions, and then whatever "a lot of relievers" means, which could range from a bunch of cheap deals and speculative adds, to this Front Office's erstwhile-or-maybe-not strategy of dumping a big chunk of payroll into the bullpen for whatever reason.
Back before the 2025 season, I wrote an article that the 2025 bullpen could look a bit different than the bullpen of the three most recent Braves seasons. Basically, that article had a table that indicated: Braves' bullpen preseason projected rank was top four or better from 2022-2024, top eight the two seasons before that, and then dropping to ninth ahead of 2025; Braves' bullpen finished in the top ten in fWAR each year from 2020-2024;
Thanks to the cornucopia of SaaS products and B2B services offered by companies on this year's Inc. Power Partners list, you don't have to. After all, the more administrative work you offload to your software stack, the more time you can spend on the things that actually made you want to be a founder in the first place.
The Reds enter the offseason likely to seek bullpen help and multiple upgrades within the lineup, but they won't have an especially lofty budget for achieving those goals. President of baseball operations Nick Krall said Tuesday that 2026's budget "will be around the same as our payroll from 2025" ( link via C. Trent Rosecrans of The Athletic). Cincinnati opened the 2025 season with a roughly $112MM payroll and finished around $116MM, per Cot's Contracts.
Senate Democrats and Republicans each defeated the other party's plan to pay at least some federal employees on time amid the ongoing government shutdown, though both sides appeared to open the door to bipartisan negotiations on the issue. The Senate voted 54-45 on a motion to begin floor consideration of legislation unveiled earlier this week by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., that would immediately pay all "excepted" employees who are forced to work during the appropriations lapse, as defined by the Office of Personnel Management. The measure needed 60 votes to advance; Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both D-Ga., voted in favor of the motion.
Two decades later, rapid! is expanding its role, evolving into a platform that connects payroll with the larger ecosystem of digital payments. rapid! offers PayCard, on-demand earned wage access (EWA), and disbursement solutions that now serve over 7,000 businesses. It sits within Green Dot's broader fintech and banking ecosystem and is powered by the company's own proprietary money-movement technology, which supports real-time payments across the US.
In a normal situation, paying employees not to work would be considered operating a 'ghost payroll,' although the CTA was just trying to make the best of it.
