The Phillies are no strangers to big spending, as the last four seasons have seen the club post the four highest Opening Day payrolls in franchise history. It looks as though the payroll ceiling will continue to rise heading into 2025, as team chairman John Middleton told Scott Lauber of the Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this week.
“Given where we are in contract cycles and minor league people coming up, I expect the player payroll to be higher [than this year] rather than lower,” Middleton said. “I’d be surprised if it’s the same, and I’d be stunned, very stunned, if it’s lower. I don’t see it being lower.”
According to projections from Cot’s Baseball Contracts and RosterResource, the Phillies have roughly somewhere between $259MM-$270MM already committed to their 2025 payroll in terms of pure dollars. The luxury tax number is even higher, with Cot’s projecting an approximate tax number of $281.5MM, and RosterResource has a rough estimate of around $288.4MM.
In either case, the Phillies are already slightly or well beyond the third tax penalty tier of $281MM. While the Phillies have paid the tax in each of the the last three seasons, the third tier has been something of an unofficial internal limit for the Phils during the Middleton era, though he has said in the past that it is by no means a hard cap. Middleton reiterated as much to Lauber, saying that “for the right player, I have a high degree of confidence that [president of baseball ops Dave Dombrowski] and I would go over the third limit.”
As Middleton noted, a spending increase was already baked into the Phillies’ plans due to internal raises alone. Zack Wheeler’s extension kicks in this winter, so he’ll go from a $23.5MM salary in 2024 to $42MM in each of the next three seasons. Philadelphia also has a pretty large arbitration class, and might save only around $8.7MM if Austin Hays, Kolby Allard, and Garrett Stubbs are all non-tendered as expected.
Dombrowski could find some creative way to move some larger contracts (say, the money owed to Nick Castellanos and Taijuan Walker) off the books to give the Phils a little more breathing room on the payroll front, though such swaps are much easier said than done. What Middleton didn’t address was whether or not the Phillies would be willing to top the fourth and final spending tier of $301MM in order to add another big-ticket talent on top of the Phils’ pre-existing core.
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