Ask yourself how many players need to be paid and paid fairly well to retain in the MLB,
that cost is only going to rise with changes demanded by the players union that improves
flexibility and free agency. Mike Trout right now is costing about .177% of the luxury tax line 197 million
which means if an MLB team only had 5.6 players per team he would be paid the median.
An active roster is 25 players with 40 on the roster total to work with. There is going to be very little available
for the great majority of Angels on the roster. After they take care of pitching and its cost demands, nothing will be left. Sure, they can go over the luxury tax, but they are already 4th-5th highest in the league, with NY/BOS 15-20m higher, there is your real hard cap based on economics. The problem for the Angels is Trout and pitching alone will take up so much that they will need to get very lucky to build a team with this expense that will make the playoffs and perhaps even win pennants and world series.
The 17.7% Trout gobbles up is more if Angels don't pierce the luxury tax ceiling. Trout was 20.29% of full roster payroll last season. There is a separate calculation to reduce some impact on the luxury tax per contract, but the sites haven't been updated yet so I can't tell you how much lower Trout's hit on the luxury tax will be. It was about 24 million last year .
Regardless, the obvious truth here is that Angels decided keeping Trout for the fan base is more important than fielding a championship contender. They are not going to field championship contenders like this. I predict they will not win a pennant in the 12 years. All the other teams will have much greater flexibility in retaining talent and signing big pitcher rotations and those other 3-4 high quality batters required to beat top level teams in October.
Yes, they overpaid somewhat, but far worse than overpaying for a few years and seeing what happens is the over-commitment of the contract for a totally boneheaded 12 years.
It was and incredibly stupid and short-sighted move. No GM wants to work with this. Other players will not see LAA as a big contract landing spot for themselves. Big as in 1/3rd of what Trout makes. Ownership must have made the decision for their own reasons, like keeping fans in the seats to see the player they love.
"WAR" doesn't make the postseason. His stats. I mean real stats not sabermetrics - are not so incredible.
https://www.baseball-reference.com/p...routmi01.shtml