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As an institution, baseball should be encouraging Steve Cohen to spend more on payroll, rather than trying to restrain the Mets.
I would argue that MLB is better served with a Goliath. It intensifies fan reaction. Think about the Yankees at the turn of this century. Their star collection and rising payrolls focused love and hate on them. And that is great for a sport. You want extreme emotions. Indifference is the enemy.
I know the immediate argument is that without a salary cap, teams could just buy championships. But the four-time champion Yankees of 1996-2000 were at times not the highest-payroll team in the sport and even when they were up top, they had yet to run and hide financially from the competition.
When they did so, the Yankees stopped winning titles. And those Yankee champions were unique, not easily duplicated, even by the wildest spenders. They had not just talent and depth. They buttressed that with a self-confidence and belief in one another that particularly steeled them in the postseason. Since the Yankee three-peat concluded in 2000, the Yankees have won one championship and no team has repeated in this century.
Eight different organizations have won the last eight titles and the last two teams to have the highest Opening Day payroll and win it all were the 2009 Yankees and the 2018 Red Sox. The biggest payroll wins far less often than perception.
The Mets entered the weekend with a payroll for luxury tax purposes at a major league-high $286 million (Spotrac). In the recently completed collective bargaining agreement, MLB owners and players agreed to a never-used-before fourth tax threshold at $290 million that quickly became known as the Cohen Tax – including by Cohen.
He has suggested the team might go over that level. And the more outrage that brings in Miami and Washington and Atlanta, the better for baseball. It is great to have a villain. Something to shoot for. Something to boo at. There is not a lot of national interest in baseball. It is such a local sport. But villainy is national.
And, really, once a team gets to $250 million, it is generally so far away from the rest of the competition, does it really matter if the payroll goes to $290 million? I think that actually benefits the smaller payroll clubs. Those types of franchises need dysfunction and mistakes from their bigger competitors, That is more likely to occur if the spending continues. The worst mistakes are made on expensive, long-term deals. That is a problem even for big spenders. There are just so many roster spots and dead weight festes, logjams form. There is just so much financial patience, even for those with the fattest wallets.
Cohen has his breaking points. The Mets have wanted a lefty reliever, yet found the asking prices of Aaron Loup and Andrew Chafin, for two examples, too high and they signed elsewhere. Would the Mets feel that way, if the payroll was, say, $240 million?
The bigger threat for the smaller spenders should not be the Mets pushing the top echelon. Instead, with the lowest tax threshold climbing from $210 million to $230 million more clubs in general are feeling emboldened to nudge their payroll upward. Ten are projected to be over $200 million, plus the Blue Jays and Cardinals are close to that border.
I sense that one or two super-teams like the Mets and Dodgers (projected at $268 million) is not as perilous to the larger body of teams, especially those at the bottom trying to contend, as a huge group of teams establishing franchise record payrolls. Yes, this is where mistakes are made. But this is also a larger pool of stars ending up on fewer clubs overall.
Ultimately, there is no perfect system (even the capped sports do not have parity). But as long as MLB has this system, Cohen’s fellow owners should hope he keeps going.
The sport needs a villain.
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