Mets owner Steve Cohen isn’t particularly happy that he’s piling $325 million into his team’s payroll this season, but he believes it’s the price of getting where he wants to go.
“I want a winning team,” he told reporters Tuesday. “And I want to get the best team I can on the field.”
Who says money can’t buy you love? Oh, right. The Cubs do. They say it regularly with their relative lack of spending. Forbes valued them at $4.2 billion last year, fourth highest in baseball. Their projected 2025 payroll is $192 million, which puts them 12th out of 30 teams. Not to worry, Cubs fans! Last month, the club unveiled five new semi-private rental spaces at Wrigley Field, each for groups of five to eight, with tickets starting at $175 a game. That centerfield area will be called “The Yard,’’ and fully stocked coolers will be supplied, which might help consumers forget that the price of a ticket isn’t going toward better players.
There are big-market teams that act like it, or overact like it, the Mets and the Dodgers being the obvious conspicuous consumers. And then there’s the big-market team that acts as if there’s another Depression going on. That’s the Cubs, whose owners probably stuff cardboard in their shoes to cover up holes in the soles.
The latest example of the Ricketts family’s fiscal closed fist was their four-year, $115 million delusion of an offer to third baseman Alex Bregman. The Red Sox offered him a three-year, $120 million contract. That put the Cubs out of the running and exposed them once again as out of touch. It says something about fan frustration that there was a much bigger outcry about the Cubs’ cheapness than there was about their pursuit of Bregman, one of the main culprits in the Astros’ 2017 cheating scandal.
The Cubs rebounded by signing 40-year-old Justin Turner to a one-year, $6 million contract. He’ll likely get spot duty at third base and – wait for it – bring “leadership’’ to the clubhouse.
Most people agree that spending in baseball is out of control. The Mets gave Juan Soto a record 15-year, $765 million contract in December. It’s part of the reason their payroll is so heavy.
“I can finance it,” Cohen said. “But is that the most optimal way to run a team? Probably not.”
Until there’s a solution, though, teams have to play the money game. The Cubs simply refuse to.
Team chairman Tom Ricketts hasn’t talked with the media at spring training this year, possibly because he had some place, any place, to be. It meant he didn’t have to answer nosy reporters’ questions about his team’s payroll.
Remember when the cutting-edge approach in baseball was to rebuild? The Cubs were on board with the idea almost immediately in the early 2010s, with then-team president Theo Epstein lauded for being, if not a visionary, then a guy who didn’t need glasses. The Cubs won the 2016 World Series after going the rebuild route.
Now the trend among the cool-kid teams is to spend a boatload of money. Funny how the Cubs decided not to be cutting edge when it involved throwing cash around. We’ll never know if spending gobs of money would have led to another World Series title for the Cubs. Trying to imagine it is like trying to imagine world peace.
The Dodgers spent $103 million in luxury tax penalties last season (the Cubs spent $570,000). They currently have five players with nine-figure contracts each. As Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred rightly pointed out the other day, the Dodgers are not the problem.
“(Payroll) disparity should be, it certainly is, at the top of my list of concerns about what’s occurring in the sport,” he said. “When I say I can’t be critical of the Dodgers — they’re doing what the system allows. If I’m going to be critical of somebody, it’s not going to be the Dodgers. It’s going to be the system.’’
We in Chicago know to be critical of big-market teams that refuse to do what the system allows. The Rickettses are a multibillion-dollar family that spends like a multimillion-dollar family. Wrigley Field is a cash cow, an obese one, and wherever that money is going, it somehow doesn’t make its way to players worthy of deep uniform pockets.
Some experts are picking the Cubs to win the National League Central this season, with anywhere from 86 to 92 victories. That’s what a payroll of $192 will get you. Would spending $100 million more win them a World Series? I don’t know. Just once, I’d like to find out.
Cohen said he wants to build a farm system that frees the franchise from the financial strain of being reliant on free agency. But … he just can’t help himself.
“I’ve always wanted to be more measured in payroll growth,” he said. “I never get there. It’s never quite there. I have the ability to spend if I have to. And I want to win, and I want to put the best team I can on the field. But free agency’s expensive. It’s just the way it is, and it’s always more expensive than you can imagine.”
How much to buy this guy and bring him to Chicago?