Posted By Jeff Fletcher on July 23, 2010 7:06 pm

One of the standard features of my interviews with Billy Beane is him making fun of me because he thinks I’m always doing payroll calculations. Most of the time he just makes fun of me for no reason, but the other day when I was writing a post about how the A’s can take the next step, I actually did try to figure out how money the A’s could spend on free agents this winter.

I came up with $20 million, and — get this — Beane conceded today that I was actually pretty close.

I came with that number this way. They had about $8 million in commitments for next year (although that number is now about $11 million with the Kurt Suzuki signing. After that I added on the the projected arbitration salaries of other guys who could be back — Kevin Kouzmanoff, Jack Cust, maybe Conor Jackson, etc. I threw in Mark Ellis, who has an option for $6 million. Ellis, plus the arb guys, plus the 0-3 guys (players with less than three years service time, who each make about $400K-$600K) adds up to maybe $30 million, at the most. So that’s about $40 million to bring back the current roster. This year’s payroll is about $60 million. Next year’s payroll could go up or down a little, but it’ll probably be in the same neighborhood.

Anyway, that leaves $20 million.

I listed a handful of free agent hitters (I assume the A’s won’t be spending on pitching) in the post the other day…

Adam Dunn, Paul Konerko, David Ortiz (maybe, he has an option), Derrek Lee, Carlos Pena, Alex Gonzalez, Jorge Cantu, Brandon Inge, Ty Wigginton, Carl Crawford, Magglio Ordonez and Jayson Werth.

The full list of free agents is here. There will also be some guys available who become free agents after they are non-tendered.

Of course, the A’s don’t have to simply use that money on free agents. They could make a trade and use some of that money to pay whoever they acquire.