It's no secret that the Houston Astros are shedding payroll like crazy. After the payroll going up every year from 2000 through 2006, it's now dropped over $25 million since 2009 and looks to go even lower in 2012.
↵The Biz of Baseball showed that Houston's total salary commitmentsdropped almost 10 percent in the past year and is down to about $81 million last season. Now that there will no longer be deferred money for Roy Oswalt, that number will go down even further and should end up somewhere around $55 million.
↵For a little perspective, the last time Houston's payroll was under $60 million was in 2000, according to Cot's Baseball Contracts.
↵What's worse, the divisional breakdowns in the article above show that Houston will be moving into an even tougher division money-wise. The AL West spent over $10 million more on average than the NL Central. If you look at the payroll estimates at Baseball Reference, three of the four current AL West teams will have payrolls over $90 million in 2012.
↵If Oakland's proposed move into San Jose proves financially beneficial, it looks like Houston will have a huge amount of pressure to spend itself in the coming years following the move into the American League.