This year’s free agent market is all but over, with only a few players still available who could be candidates for major league deals. Let’s take a look at the overall spending on the year by team to see how it breaks down, using the MLBTR Free Agent Tracker (which I filtered to remove minor league deals, extensions, options, and foreign contracts).
We did the same thing last year, you may recall, and the results are rather different. For one thing, no team came anywhere near the Yankees’ spending (just shy of $500MM). For another, the total spend actually declined by about 13%. As recent historical results show, this year’s overall outlay is still a significant increase over other recent seasons, and differences in the player market may represent the primary explanation. Nevertheless, that fact suggests that further exploration is in order, which I will endeavor to do in the coming weeks.
Without further ado, here are the numbers, in table and chart form:
