Yasmani Grandal 2018 salary arbitration preview

Salary arbitration season is here, with January 12 the date for players and teams to exchange salaries. The Dodgers have eight players eligible for arbitration this winter, with the most expensive of the group likely to be catcher Yasmani Grandal.

Last year we looked at Grandal’s case and just how hard it was to find truly comparable players, and this year is more of the same. Part of the problem is that catching is the toughest position in baseball, and consistently good backstops are hard to find.

Many teams over the last decade or so have locked up young catchers to contract extensions signed prior to their arbitration years.

Given the timing of these contracts and the risk involved in signing the long-term deals, there isn’t much we can take from the annual salaries themselves, but we might be able to learn something form the year-to-year increase from each catcher’s fifth season to his sixth year.

That is where Grandal is now, with five years, 115 days of major league service time and one more year before qualifying for free agency.

The average increase for these eight catchers heading into their sixth year is 34.3%. Grandal earned $5.5 million in 2017, and adding 34.3% to that would put him just shy of $7.4 million in 2018.

The elephant in the room

Grandal slumped in the second half in 2017 and saw his walk rate plummet, and lost his starting job in the postseason to Austin Barnes, who started 13 of 15 games behind the plate for the Dodgers, including every World Series game.

With the Dodgers suddenly in a position to stay under the competitive balance tax threshold in 2018, Grandal’s pending salary might be too much of a luxury to keep, especially if he doesn’t carry a starter’s load.

For next season the best case scenario is probably for Barnes and Grandal to share time behind the plate, if that is even feasible. Grandal is still a valuable player, but it remains to be seen if the Dodgers will utilize that value in his production or through what he might bring back in a trade.

For comparable catchers that went year to year through the arbitration process, I went back a little further this year just to widen the field a little bit. First up, here are the career numbers.

Grandal has better career numbers than over half of this group, with Matt Wieters and Russell Martin besting him in bulk numbers and Mike Napoli (back when he was a catcher) the only one measurably better than Grandal on offense.

The average sixth-year salary of these eight catchers is $6.3 million, with half of them earning less than what Grandal made in year five ($5.5 million).

Here are these same catchers with their numbers from their launch years, when they attained five years of service time.

Martin seems like the closest comp here for Grandal in launch year production, especially in WAR. But even Martin isn’t the best comparable catcher because his 2011 season came after he was non-tendered by the Dodgers and was coming off a rare hip injury and actually took a pay cut from his 2010 season, from $5.05 million to $4 million. Martin got $7.5 million from the Yankees in 2012 in his final year of salary arbitration.

The guess

MLB Trade Rumors projected a salary of $7.7 million for Grandal in 2018, but that Martin number seems closer to me. I will guess a $7.4 million salary for Grandal next season.