Joe Strauss tallied the 2005 and 2006 payroll as part of a larger story about the thin skin of Cardinals' ownership. Strauss totals up 2005 payroll to $90 million, which surprised me a little bit as the number usually cited is $94 million. Of course the Cardinals didn't pay all of Larry Walker's salary and they paid very little of Roger Cedeño's salary (good grief, Cedeño made $5 million last year to play like an A-baller), and Strauss reflects that. The problem is if you total Strauss's numbers up, you get $87.4 million instead of $90 million. There was a little more money spent on the John Gall-variety cups of coffee, but that's not covering the difference. I suppose you should throw in the deferred money to Woody Williams and friends.

Or should you? Cashflow accounting generally doesn't work well for large, sophisticated businesses -- consider the upfront cost of building an automobile factory, for example -- and the Cardinals are a large, sophisticated business. So when you try to account the "best" way, you start applying things like the matching principle, which says "Expenses are recognized not when the work is performed, or when a product is produced, but when the work or the product actually makes its contribution to revenue." In one sense it's hard to claim Woody Williams contributed to revenue in 2005, aside from getting bombed by the Cardinals in the NLDS. On the other hand, part of the reason the Cardinals sold so many tickets in 2005 was their success in 2004, and Woody most definitely contributed there. Then again, so did Mike Matheny and Edgar Renteria. Should we count some part of their salaries? Heck, somebody like Ted Sizemore might've contributed in some small way to 2005 ticket sales. Should we count his salary too?

There's an old line about accountants, ask them what 2+2 is and they'll tell you it's whatever you want it to be. The connotations are unfair, but there's some grain of truth here. With the paltry hard data we have at our disposal, it isn't easy to assess the present financial state of the Cardinals and even if we had complete information, it still would be difficult to assess the economics of the various options the Cardinals have (e.g., signing AJ Burnett). In essence, we won't know much beyond what the team wants us to know and dwelling on the matter is doomed to become an exercise in frustration.