he likes the NYY, he'll also be old at the end of that, but we could probably afford it.
While the market is slow this year, the guys who are signing are beating projections. Schwarber topped his arb projection, Hendriks's AAV is more than Hand would have gotten for one year, McCann signed for a lot more than projected, and DJL was projected at 3 years, $42MM on FG. that struck me as low, but it shouldn't have been <50% of his contract low.
I think you are right and that COVID hasn't affected salaries as much as originally anticipated.
Doing some digging on approximating CBT values, I hate the way Spotrac estimates vs. Cots. Spotrac estimates that all players on the 40-man roster will receive league minimum, which is impossible to do. Only players on the active roster get paid full league minimum, and if they are sent up or down over the course of a season, their pay is prorated. Cots tries to estimate what a legitimate number would be of all total rookie contract players instead of the nonsense Spotrac does. The difference ends up being nearly 7.5Million less headroom according to Spotrac.
So I'm throwing out Spotrac as a valid source for CBT estimates and going off Cots, the Nats have just over 37M in space under the CBT. Now I doubt the Lerner's will spend up to the limit given what happened last season, but there is certainly some room there in which to fill a few more holes.
