[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by PSUColonel

Using your logic from number one, the luxury tax should be around 152.

Are you using actual MLB payrolls to figure this? I would argue you can't really do this since I'm not sure to what degree OOTP tracks total player expenditures by the end of the season.

In real life, for example, it counts the 40-man roster. It distributes the pay of traded players through the date of the trade to each team as appropriate. Players outrighted to the minors have their pay included up to the point of the outright assignment. The annual average value of the contract is used, signing bonuses are prorated, etc. There are lots of little accounting considerations. None of which I don't think OOTP recognizes.

Here are the actual 2012 MLB luxury tax payrolls as calculated by MLB itself. The threshold that season was $178 million.

2012 MLB Luxury Tax Payrolls

           Wages and
    Team    Bonuses      Benefits        Total
-------------------------------------------------
 1  NYA   212,639,568   10,799,590    223,439,158
 2  BOS   167,153,233   10,799,590    177,952,823
 3  ANA   165,853,248   10,799,590    176,652,838
 4  PHI   163,723,842   10,799,590    174,523,432
 5  SFN   149,599,538   10,799,590    160,399,128
 6  LAN   147,458,980   10,799,590    158,258,570
 7  TEX   137,714,380   10,799,590    148,513,970
 8  DET   134,431,998   10,799,590    145,231,588
 9  SLN   115,011,681   10,799,590    125,811,271
10  MIL   110,065,731   10,799,590    120,865,321
11  WAS   108,179,349   10,799,590    118,978,939
12  CIN   107,970,471   10,799,590    118,770,061
13  CHA   103,659,970   10,799,590    114,459,560
14  CHN   101,912,251   10,799,590    112,711,841
15  MIA   101,025,043   10,799,590    111,824,633
16  COL    95,402,597   10,799,590    106,202,187
17  MIN    95,060,855   10,799,590    105,860,445
18  NYN    94,904,428   10,799,590    105,704,018
19  ATL    94,518,437   10,799,590    105,318,027
20  TOR    92,926,944   10,799,590    103,726,534
21  BAL    86,256,650   10,799,590     97,056,240
22  ARI    78,092,126   10,799,590     88,891,716
23  SEA    77,590,403   10,799,590     88,389,993
24  KCA    72,662,838   10,799,590     83,462,428
25  CLE    71,826,426   10,799,590     82,626,016
26  TBA    70,406,588   10,799,590     81,206,178
27  PIT    69,517,437   10,799,590     80,317,027
28  SDN    68,017,905   10,799,590     78,817,495
29  OAK    62,273,913   10,799,590     73,073,503
30  HOU    61,465,789   10,799,590     72,265,379
-------------------------------------------------
Total   3,217,322,619  323,987,700  3,541,310,319

Only the Yankees exceeded the threshold in 2012; the Red Sox were just under it.