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Look, we get it. In Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, perhaps the notion of an Armageddon-level work stoppage was almost appealing. In Kansas City and Cleveland, the lockout probably felt less apocalyptic and more like an opportunity for profound market correction.
In Minneapolis and Milwaukee, in Miami and Tampa, the notion of cost-control would certainly seem like a reasonable idea.
But we are not Pittsburgh or Cincinnati. We are not Kansas City or Cleveland. We are not Minneapolis or Milwaukee or Miami or Tampa. We are New York City. We are Batman’s Gotham and Superman’s Metropolis. We are the biggest of big markets. We have never before apologized for that, and we shouldn’t start now.
Only now, both of our baseball teams are taking that to heart.
This summer, the Mets and the Yankees will combine to spend well over a half-billion dollars on baseball players, and if that seems outrageous … well, sure, on one level, a practical and logical level, it probably is outrageous. And there will be times the next six months, when you’re shelling out $12 for a beer and $55 for parking, when it will almost certainly be outrageous.
But there will be other nights, many other nights, when you simply lose yourself in the nightly rituals of baseball, when you click on SNY or YES in your living room, when you tune to WFAN or WCBS on your patio, and you will simply lose yourself in the baseball season, when you’ll allow John and Suzyn and Howie and Wayne to carry you away.
And to get carried away.
Because you can say all you want about the manner in which both teams constructed their rosters; you can take issue with this player who wasn’t traded for or that free agent who wasn’t signed. But one thing you cannot say about baseball New York, in Queens or in The Bronx, on either side of the RFK Bridge, is this:
They are not scrimping.
They have both shattered the luxury-tax ceiling, and as of Monday, according to sportrac.com’s MLB payroll tracker, the Mets were prepared to pay $278 million and the Yankees $254 million, including the likely surcharges for surging past the competitive balance tax limits. As Casey Stengel — who as a player once threatened to hold out over $75 — might have said: you can look it up. Or, better yet, just use a calculator.
That’s $532 million. One city. Two teams.
(And both still trail the Dodgers, who before all is said and done may well scrape or splinter the $300 million payroll plateau.)
“It’s great for the fans in New York to have two competitive baseball teams,” Hal Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ managing general partner, said a few weeks ago in Tampa. “We’re in different leagues, but to a certain extent we’re rivals, and it’s going to make the summer a lot of fun.”
Steinbrenner, of course, has been the object of some Yankee-fan derision. Part of that is because he runs the team far differently than his father, who out of either habit or addiction would often approach free-agent season like an all-you-can-eat buffet. And part of that is because the Mets’ owner, Steve Cohen, the sport’s richest man, has made little secret of his willingness to spend chunks of his fortune on his baseball team.
Still — if Steinbrenner is being “cheap,” then $256.5 million kind of redefines the definition.
“I think,” Steinbrenner said, “we have a pretty good history of having high payrolls and putting a good amount of resources into the players we have.”
They do have history, and it would behoove Yankees fans to remember that.
The Mets? There have been years when they flexed their financial muscle — often to disastrous results. But the Wilpon family’s final decade-plus of stewardship was played almost entirely under a post-Madoff smog cloud, and so what is remembered are payrolls and rosters that always felt a little short — and often turned out to be just that.
The Mets may or may not start to stack championships like Jenga pieces, but for as long as Cohen owns them, they aren’t likely to ever again stand accused of parading around in a small-market team’s modest garments.
“Listen, $290 million is a lot of money to spend overall,” Cohen told reporters last month during a visit to Port St. Lucie. “Like I said before, I’m OK with it, and I’m willing to live with it. And we’ll leave it at that.”
So we are left with this: the feeling you get after you surpass your personal high on a bench press, or a bicep curl, or a pull-down. New York’s baseball muscles are flexed. That may not guarantee a mutual date in late October. But it won’t be for lack of trying. Or spending.
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