Since starting to cover baseball in 2006, the idea of player payroll has always been a slightly complicated subject to me. And over that time, understanding everything that goes into what a team spends on its payroll for any season is something that has only gotten slightly easier to comprehend over that time.
Teams don’t make it any easier by not providing the details of payroll and contracts for obvious reasons. So when fans would say, the Mariners or another team are spending less on payroll this season compared to the year before, they could legitimately make that assumption by looking at the information provided to them.