I Love Being Right!

I’m not one to toot my own horn (we all know how painful that can be), but I just want to point out how surprisingly right I was about the Mets payroll this season.

On January 12, with just 10 players under contract, I did a player-by-player breakdown of what I thought the Mets payroll would be. For the 25-man roster (plus stinky D.J. Carrasco) I came up with a grand total of $94,330,000.

Well, the good folks at Cot’s Baseball Contracts have posted the opening day payrolls of every team, and the Mets total is $94,508,822. That’s shockingly close to what I said! They included the contract of Pedro Beato, who started the season on the DL, so if you take his salary away, the total is $94,021,322 for the 25-man roster (plus of course stinky Carrasco).

I’m as stunned as you are that I came within a few hundred thousand dollars of predicting the payroll. I’m not sure how I did it, and I don’t know if I could ever do it again. But I do know one thing — I fared far better than Adam Rubin of ESPNNewYork.com. We coincidentally posted the same story on the same day, and he came up with a total of $90,050,000.

I sent him a note on Twitter pointing out how odd it was that we did the same thing. He responded with this:

pretty close. you’re high on guys like niese. he won’t make the $480k minimum, but mets can pay whatever they want over that.

Just for the record, I had Jonathon Niese at $750,000, he pegged him at $500,000. I was closer to his actual 2012 salary of $819,500.

So the next time you want accurate predictions, stick with Blogging Mets, not some fly-by-night operation like ESPN!