Rays' Snell on $15K raise: Other teams 'adequately compensate' similar players
Tampa Bay Rays ace and reigning AL Cy Young winner Blake Snell is less than pleased with his organization's front office after receiving a minimal raise for the upcoming season.
Snell's reward for being named the AL's top pitcher was only a $15,500 raise in salary, it was announced Sunday, meaning he'll earn just $573,700 - only slightly above the $555,000 minimum - in 2019.
Because he's not yet eligible for arbitration, Snell had no say in the matter, but the 26-year-old expressed his thoughts in a statement released through his agents to Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times.
"The Rays have the right under the collective bargaining agreement to renew me at or near the league-minimum salary. They also have the ability to more adequately compensate me, as other organizations have done with players who have similar achievements to mine. The Rays chose the former," Snell said.
"I will have no further comment and look forward to competing with my teammates and field staff in our quest to win the World Series in 2019."
Snell, who's under control of the Rays through the 2022 season, previously spoke about the issue on Saturday, telling Topkin that he was "disappointed."
In giving Snell the minuscule raise, the Rays stuck with their standard policy of paying all pre-arbitration players using an internal scale that's based around service time, according to Topkin. While the team's scale apparently includes a built-in "slight margin" for performance rewards, the Rays chose to ignore it in this case.
Snell's Cy Young-winning 2018 campaign helped the Rays to a surprising 90-win season despite the team continuing to field one of the league's lowest payrolls. While Tampa Bay did make a rare splash in free agency this winter by signing veteran starter Charlie Morton, the team's current payroll of $51,702,866 is the lowest in baseball, according to Spotrac.
The Rays' spending habits have been the subject of scrutiny in the past. Last year, the MLB Players Association filed a grievance accusing Tampa Bay and three other teams of failing to comply with rules regarding the spending of revenue-sharing money they'd received.
Snell isn't the only pre-arbitration player who's spoken out about salary issues this week. St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Jack Flaherty, who also received a minimal raise despite a fifth-place finish in Rookie of the Year voting last season, said Saturday that "the system as a whole is not great," according to Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.