One of the Reds' highest-paid players this season will be … Ken Griffey Jr.?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/one-reds-highest-paid-players-101617509.html
What in the name of Bobby Bonilla is going on with the Reds? Cincinnati's cost-cutting ways have brought a Hall of Fame name back into the national discussion: Ken Griffey Jr.
That's because the 52-year-old ex-slugger - who retired in 2010 - will be among the Reds' highest-paid players this season.
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Griffey isn't putting his uniform back on and taking his sweet swing to the plate once again at Great American Ball Park. He does have a relatively hefty salary on the Reds' books this season, though, thanks to a contract he signed in 2000 that hands him approximately $3.6 million annually in deferred payments from 2009 to 2024.
That's not a ton of money for a major league player these days, but as the Reds have pared their payroll since last season, Griffey's salary has been moving up the ranks. Following trades Sunday and Monday of pitcher Sonny Gray, all-star outfielder Jesse Winker and infielder Eugenio Suárez, only five members of the 2022 Reds are in line to get paid more than the 1997 American League MVP.
That's assuming that arbitration-eligible pitchers Luis Castillo and Tyler Mahle attain projected salaries of $7.5 million and $5.5 million, respectively, per Spotrac. That pair would also need to avoid Gray's fate and not be traded for cost-controlled prospects. The only Reds set to make more this year are first baseman Joey Votto ($25 million), a 38-year-old who has spent his entire career with the organization; infielder Mike Moustakas ($16 million); and outfielder Shogo Akiyama ($8 million).
Any discussion of a former major league star remaining on a team's payroll years after his career ended begins with the 59-year-old Bonilla, whose deferred payments from the New York Mets have famously pumped $1.2 million into his bank account every year since 2011 and will continue to do so until 2035. Celebrating "Bobby Bonilla Day" on July 1, the day his payment arrives, has become such a thing with baseball fans that the Mets themselves began taking part in the festivities (albeit with an un-fun corporate tie-in) last year.
Bonilla, who retired in 2001, is not the only long-ago Met to still be getting deferred payments from the team. Bret Saberhagen, who pitched in Queens from 1992 to 1995 and whose major league career also ended in 2001, made a deal that included $250,000 every year starting in 2004 and continuing for a quarter-century.
Plenty of other major league teams also use deferred payments to push player expenses into the future. Manny Ramirez, speaking of blasts from the past, is still picking up checks from the Boston Red Sox and, unfortunately for the Baltimore Orioles, Chris Davis has many millions heading his way for years to come.
The amounts being bestowed upon Griffey and Bonilla are mere pittances compared with the $15 million Max Scherzer continues to receive annually from an unusually structured contract he signed with the Washington Nationals in 2015. Nominally a seven-year pact ending in 2021, it deferred half of its $210 million total to another seven-year period starting in 2022.
Unlike Griffey and Bonilla, Scherzer has not retired and in fact signed a three-year, $130 million contract with the Mets in November. Thus, he is on the books this year for $43.3 million from the Mets and another $15 million from the Nationals. In other words, as things stand now Scherzer will be the highest-paid player in all of baseball and, separately, the fourth-highest-paid player in Washington.
Meanwhile, mentions of Griffey have gone from evoking memories of "The Kid" to eliciting cries of, "You've got to be kidding me."
