With the official announcements that Daniel Murphy and Stephen Drew are part of the 2016 Nats roster, there is certainly more clarity on the payroll and personnel. Of course Mike Rizzo will most likely make another tweak or 2 and if he does we will trash these charts and spreadsheets and make edits and publish reworked charts and spreadsheets.
Here is our Opening Day roster projections with 2 spots left for the remaining spot on the bench and the remaining spot in the bullpen:
Here is the new 40 man roster to pick from for the last roster spots for Opening Day:
There will also be a growing list of Spring Training invitees like Chris Heisey, Reed Johnson and Sean Burnett. They will all compete for that 25th spot as the old saying goes that the best 25 go north!
Here is the updated salaries, deferrals, and notes including arbitration eligible players with estimates:
The Nats 2015 payroll moved the team into the upper echelon with the big spenders 
in the Majors as the Nats were firmly in the top 1/2 dozen of all teams on Opening Day 2015. The Nats Opening Day payroll was #6 according to Sports Illustrated’s calculation of Opening Day 2015 payrolls at $162,014,559. The payroll before deferrals today would be around $134 million and the salary cap number includes the deferrals puts the Nats at $147 million. Unless the Lerners sign-off on a major acquisition there might not be much more movement in the payroll. The good news to that would be that this could allow some July deadline acquisitions by Mike Rizzo to make additions for the playoff push.
