1 week Ago By Zachary D. Rymer
There's a change in the forecast for the MLB offseason, and it calls for rain. Specifically of cash, and lots of it. And whether we're talking small-market owners or anyone else, nobody is in a position to complain.
Even uninterested bystanders might have sensed something is up in baseball, given a single player just got three-quarters of the way to $1 billion. Even more than that, in fact, as Juan Soto's 15-year deal with Steve Cohen's New York Mets pays out at least $765 million and as much as $805 million. By total dollars, Soto exceeded Shohei Ohtani's 10-year, $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers by "only" $65 million.
Yet because of Ohtani's deferrals , the gap is more like $300 million. Meanwhile, Max Fried ($218 million), Willy Adames ($182 million) and Blake Snell ($182 million) have also signed nine-figure deals with the New York Yankees, San Francisco Giants and Dodgers, respectively. That already equals how many nine-figure deals were signed last winter, and the market hasn't even gotten to Corbin Burnes, Alex Bregman and Pete Alonso.
Big Offseason Spending Went Away for a Second Though offseason spending hasn't always been measured by the billions, that has been the case since at least 2011. That's as far back as Spotrac 's records go. And in the five offseasons preceding this one, there was one blip with an obvious cause and one blip that was more of a head-scratcher: That 2020-21 slump happened after the COVID-shortened season, which MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said cost teams $3 billion in revenue.
The drop from 2022-23 to 2023-24 happened amid the collapse of the regional sports network broadcasting model, which forced MLB to warn teams to brace for short-term losses. There has since been an adjustment involving the dispersion of revenue-sharing dollars. All the same, it was shocking how even the best players in the 2023-24 market didn't get paid.
Ohtani obviously did, and so did Yoshinobu Yamamoto ($325 million) and Jung Hoo Lee ($113 million). According to FanGraphs , though, the 10 free agents who were supposed to be the most expensive players after Ohtani undershot their projected contracts by $121.5 million.
Now It's So Back But this offseason? This offseason is different. Spending has already eclipsed $2 billion. And of the 10 biggest free-agent deals so far, eight are more than FanGraphs projected.
Soto beat his by $180 million, while Fried ($93 million), Adames ($32 million) and Snell ($62 million) beat theirs by meaningful margins. Regarding what's driving the spending, it's hard to ignore the markets attached to the four biggest deals: New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. New York and Los Angeles rank first and second among MLB's markets.
San Francisco ranked fifth earlier this year, but that was when it was still sharing the Bay Area with the Athletics, who have since gotten lost to Sacramento. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that this is, in fact, fine. This conclusion is based on two certitudes, the first of which concerns the notion that teams that spend more tend to win more.
It isn't always the case, but it often is , and it sure applies to 2024. The three highest-spending teams all made it to the Championship Series round. As to the other certitude, well, shouldn't the teams that have the most money be the ones that also spend the most money? This is a point you'd expect super-agent Scott Boras to make, and he did so in 2012.
" The major franchises who are getting the majority of revenues should provide a product, or an attempt at a product, that has the near-highest payrolls commensurate with the markets they are in," he told The New York Times (h/t Adam Rubin for ESPN). The counter-argument to such positions focuses on how small-market teams are at a disadvantage that is only worsening. Unless something drastic happens—for example, a salary cap—it will only worsen.
However, there's another angle to all this. Are Other Teams Poor? Or Just Cheap? There was a sense that MLB was facing a payroll disparity crisis when the league went into a lockout during the 2021-22 offseason, and it was still there afterward. It's hard to say things have gotten better.
Between payroll and luxury taxes, according to Spotrac , the highest-spending team of 2022 spent about 4.4 times as much money as the lowest-spending team. That gulf has since grown, first to 6.
0 in 2023 before only going back down to 5.6 this year. Yet, as easy as it is to pin the blame on the teams at the top, that ignores what teams at the bottom aren't spending.
This is hard to know without exact figures for how annual earnings relate to payrolls. But in October, Travis Sawchik of The Score presented an experiment comparing teams' 2023 revenues to their 2024 payrolls. The result: On average, payrolls were short of revenues by $191 million.
It is frustrating that traditional big-spenders such as the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Detroit Tigers and Washington Nationals were some of the worst offenders. But the worst were clubs like the Athletics, Tampa Bay Rays, Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates. The truth is certainly more complicated.
As demonstrated by the Athletics' club record three-year, $67 million deal with Luis Severino, the MLB Players Association does have some muscle regarding how teams use revenue-sharing dollars. As a rule, though, the MLB landscape is divided between teams that are spending what they should and teams that simply aren't. The owners of the latter bunch—most notably, John Fisher, Stuart Sternberg, Bob Castellini and Bob Nutting—just keep it to themselves.
"You know, people can get mad or say what they want, and say, 'They spent all the money,'" Dodgers legend Clayton Kershaw told Bob Nightengale of USA Today earlier in 2024. "Well, why don't you guys do it too. Being an owner is a lucrative business, I don't care what people say.
Go do it, too.'' When it comes time to write the next collective bargaining agreement, there may be ways for MLB to legislate bottom-feeding teams to catch up. Tighter policing of revenue-sharing dollars could do the trick.
Failing that, there is always the nuclear option of a payroll floor. In the meantime, a little public shaming can't hurt. And if an owner doesn't want to hear it, they should remember that nobody is making them do this.
Selling is a viable option, as there isn't one ownership group that doesn't stand to make at least $1 billion by finding a buyer. And while the Miami Marlins prove nothing is guaranteed , sometimes a new owner is just what a team needs. Indeed, some of the most successful franchises have relatively new owners.
In the last 15 years , teams that have won World Series after changing hands include the Dodgers, Cubs, Houston Astros and Texas Rangers. Others have found greater success, including the San Diego Padres and, so far, the Mets. By all available evidence, that last team is just getting started.
And if nothing else, Cohen has raised the standard for other owners in the meantime. If any others don't want to live up to it, well, there's the door. Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference , FanGraphs and Baseball Savant .
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