Tigers' Framber Valdez $115M splash has Mariners fans feeling payroll envy

The Seattle Mariners' 2026 payroll is a good news/bad news situation. It's up from 2025, but still a middle-of-the-road payroll at a projected $162 million. That remains the franchise's lane even in a World Series-or-bust year.

Because this is a World Series-caliber team — particularly after this week's long-awaited trade for Brendan Donovan — maybe quibbling about payroll amounts to picking nits. All anyone should want is a great team, regardless of the cost.

However, it's harder to come down on this side of the fence after what happened on Wednesday. Out of nowhere, the Detroit Tigers signed Framber Valdez to a three-year, $115 million contract. That's $38.3 million per year, more than Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez will earn in 2026 combined.

Depending on what happens with Tarik Skubal's arbitration case, the Tigers are now set to open this season with a $209 million payroll. That's almost $50 million higher than Seattle's projection.

Mariners fans have every reason to wonder why their team doesn't do $200 million payrolls

This stings, if for no other reason than it sucks to see a team the Mariners just beat in the 2025 playoffs invest even more into winning in 2026. And should Seattle and Detroit meet in October again, a Skubal-Valdez duo will represent a very real threat.

The economic circumstances of both franchise should only further frustrate Mariners fans. Compared to the Tigers, the Mariners:

1. Play in a bigger market
2. Pulled in $59 million more in revenue as recently as 2024

Finance types and people who carry water for billionaires (sorry, no other way to put it) will point out that the market-revenue-payroll relationship is more complicated than this. One has no doubt about that. And yet, that doesn't make one blind to the weird contrast of the Mariners not spending more than a Tigers franchise that doesn't have as many financial advantages.

This, in turn, deflects one's attention from the team the Mariners actually have to the team they could have.

Whereas only a reunion with Josh Naylor fit within the Mariners' actual offseason budget, also bringing back Jorge Polanco and Eugenio Suárez could have been possible if $200 million was the payroll goal. Even then, there could have been more left over for, say, a better backup catcher than Andrew Knizner and maybe even a proper right field upgrade.

None of this is the fault of Jerry Dipoto, who does what he can (which was a lot in 2025) with the budget he gets. And if anything can be said in owner John Stanton's defense, the Mariners' 2026 payroll is far from final. He greenlit the budget to add Naylor and Suárez at the deadline last year, and could conceivably do so again for necessary additions this summer.

Lest anyone forget, though, it wasn't even a year ago that Mariners fans were starting to give Stanton the "Sell the Team" treatment. That understandably died down as 2025 went along, but it could come back if the franchise's commitment to staying in its lane becomes a problem in 2026.