A prevailing mantra at the end of a baseball offseason — both from fans and front offices — is that a certain player has been “overpaid” or was undesirable at a certain price point.
While obviously no one in their right mind would give a backup catcher $20 million a year, in a sports league like MLB, which operates without a salary cap, it seems silly for fans and general managers to believe that giving a player a certain amount of money would make them overpaid.
Any athlete who has reached free agency and has started angling for a new contract did so because they played well enough to command that type of money. They played well enough to field, and in many cases, accept that offer. All you did as a fan was get mad. In these situations when a top notch player goes to a new club for more opportunities, financial and otherwise, they should be celebrated for cashing in on their value when it was at or near its highest.
In baseball, every team can afford to pay every player, most of them just choose not to. On the player side, signing for multi millions is both the reward for their hard work and elevation through a system designed to undermine and underpay them, and exactly what they’re supposed to do. Wouldn’t you take an eight-figure salary to play a game for a living?
In many of these situations, leaving means either joining a team with more promise, moving to a more appealing city, or both. It’s no different than the average civilian leaving their hometown — or in baseball players’ cases, the organization that drafted them — for the glitzy life they’ve always dreamed of. There is no valor in purposefully making things harder, romanticizing the struggle when a better life is not only possible, but also comes with a fairer level of compensation.
On the team side, the bizarre avoidance of “overpaying” can also mean a removal from contention. Several teams probably should “overpay” by their limiting standards, if they’re serious about competing, particularly against the teams that are spending money with impunity. We’ve seen this from one of the Big Apple’s teams recently. Mets’ owner Steve Cohen has not backed down from the luxury tax penalty that has taken his name. The “Steve Cohen tax” has not only failed to deter the billionaire owner from using his stacks of cash, it’s spawned a level of cockiness that used to define the team in the Bronx.
“It’s still a lot of money to spend on a payroll,” Cohen recently said of the projected $265 million payroll the Mets will bring to 2022. “I don’t feel like it’s so confining that I can’t live with it.” In saying that his payroll would “probably” exceed the new competitive balance tax, Cohen displayed the kind of unapologetic, win-at-all-exorbitant-costs mentality that once belonged to the Steinbrenners.
On Steinbrenner’s squad, the Gerrit Cole, Giancarlo Stanton and DJ LeMahieu contracts still launch them into the upper echelon of MLB payrolls. The collective talent of the roster does not currently put them in the upper echelon of baseball teams, though, especially as they lost out on heavyweight free agents to teams in the increasingly fearsome American League. The easiest path for improvement this winter was through the almighty dollar, which is apparently now nested in some hyper-protected safe rather than in the wallets of Carlos Correa or Trevor Story.
This stark departure from his dad’s way of doing things could work out for Hal Steinbrenner, but he’s placing a lot of confidence in this new, risky method rather than the old, proven one. The Yankees could have eliminated a major part of the uncertainty surrounding their validity if they paid a free agent to jump on board. The Yankees have not signed a single major league free agent who hasn’t already played for the team, instead giving out a handful of minor league contracts and modest deals to retain Anthony Rizzo and Joely Rodriguez. The Yankees would be sitting much prettier if they wrote the big checks that Correa, Story, Freddie Freeman, Max Scherzer, Robbie Ray, or other deserving candidates were asking for.
While it’s possible that the Yankees made their offers, were politely turned down, and shifted their focus to the trade market, which got them Josh Donaldson, it’s hard to accept that a team with such a historically liberal approach to free agency came back from this fruitful market empty handed. Especially when seeing some of the relatively low figures given to Correa (three years, $105.3 million with opt outs after the first two seasons), Story (six years, $140 million with an opt out after four), and starting pitcher Carlos Rodon (two years, $44 million with an inning-dependent opt out after one), the Yankees easily could have and probably should have gone a little harder.
It’s not like Hal Steinbrenner wasn’t around when the Yankees won the 2009 World Series after giving Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett a combined $423 million in the same offseason. Hopefully he paid attention as the Dodgers became the 2010s version of the Yankees, virtually guaranteeing a playoff spot every year by using their money to attract the best players.
It’s a strategy that has worked before, is working again, and will continue working as long as money talks. Going silent is a very strange play for anyone, but the Yankees specifically balking at the notion of overpaying is troubling for many reasons.
MLB just endured a painful lockout because of the owners’ tight-fisted labor practices, and in a sport so rife with collusion in its past, every player who reaches free agency deserves to sign on the dotted line for generational wealth.
The idea that a billion-dollar corporation could “overpay” its employees is antiquated, anti-worker, and from a fan’s perspective, a whole new level of hating. It’s not your money to give out, and it certainly was never your money to receive, unless you’ve been secretly sitting at your desk job with a nasty slider up your sleeve.
If a baseball player getting $100 million sparks jealousy, I don’t know what to tell you. If a baseball player getting $100 million leads you to think they’re making too much money, wait until you find out how much the owners make.
