The best game money can buy

Money doesn’t buy championships, but it certainly helps.

Eight of the past 12 World Series winners have had a payroll in the top 10 in Major League Baseball in the season in which they won.

The exceptions: the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals, the 2015 Kansas City Royals, the since-tainted 2017 Houston Astros and the 2021 Atlanta Braves. Of the winners, the Royals are the only one considered to be a small-market club.

So when the 2022 MLB campaign begins Thursday, expectations will be highest for the teams at the very top of the payroll rankings.

They are a mix of the usual suspects (the Los Angeles Dodgers, Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees) and a newcomer (New York Mets) — all from big markets. They are the teams that were, in several ways, at the center of a 99-day lockout that ended nearly three decades of labor peace in the sport.

The resurgence of the oncethrifty Mets has added a new dynamic to the baseball hierarchy in New York and across MLB. Because of the willingness of the Mets’ second-year owner, Steven Cohen, to spend money, a new luxury tax threshold that was negotiated into the sport’s new labor agreement by the 30 MLB club owners has been nicknamed after him. Meanwhile, the owner of the always-contending Yankees, Hal Steinbrenner, has bristled at the notion that he needs to keep up with Cohen.

“I can’t control what resources other owners or other teams have, and what they’re going to do with those resources,” Steinbrenner said last month.

“I make the same commitment every year, my family does, which is to do everything we’re able to do to field a championship caliber team and try to win a World Series.”

But the Yankees haven’t won a World Series, or even appeared in one, since 2009. The Mets’ last title came in 1986, but their most recent trip was in 2015. The Dodgers have appeared in three of the past five, winning in 2020.

Those three clubs, all projected to pay the luxury tax this season, top the projected MLB payroll rankings heading into opening day. According to Fangraphs’ payroll calculations for luxury tax purposes, the Dodgers ($293 million) lead the pack, followed by the Mets ($287 million) and Yankees ($262 million).

“It’s great for the fans in New York to have two competitive baseball teams,” Steinbrenner said.

Steinbrenner was one of the seven owners on MLB’S labor committee who negotiated the new collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union. For months, the sides bickered about the economic foundation of the sport. A significant reason for the tension: MLB is the only one of the major North American men’s professional sports leagues without a hard salary cap. In the NFL and NBA, revenue is split between team owners and players at a fixed rate.

But in MLB, where players’ salaries are public but owners’ revenues are not, teams can spend as little as they want. They can also spend as much as they want — as long as they are willing to pay the competitive balance tax penalties, which are viewed as a soft cap by some teams and a hard one by others.

The union successfully negotiated the largest luxury tax threshold jump from one labor agreement to the next, with the first threshold going from $210 million in 2021 to $230 million in 2022. To get that, though, the players agreed to a new, fourth threshold at $60 million over the base.

That is not a problem for Cohen.

“Listen, $290 million is a lot of money to spend overall, and I’m OK with it,” he said last month. “I don’t feel like it’s so confining that I can’t live with it.”