Moves making dollar$ & sense
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — If you run a business, you aspire to build as much revenue while expending as little capital as possible, right?
(Just assuming here. I don’t run my family’s budget, let alone an actual business.)
That equation grows considerably trickier in professional sports, where customers know how much teams invest in talent and can spitball the intake on ticket sales, TV deals and so on. As the Mets can tell you from their self-inflicted travails of the last decade, big-market clubs in particular score no points for profit margin.
Which brings us to the Associated Press tally that the 2017 Yankees kicked off their season with Major League Baseball’s third-highest payroll, the franchise’s lowest such ranking since 1993. Do the Yankees deserve grief for their relative penny-pinching?
I don’t think so. In their case, the Yankees’ optimal road back to being No. 1 in both categories — most money spent and most talent — requires a temporary step back in the former column.
“As I have said many times, a team shouldn’t need a $200-plus-million dollar payroll to win championships,” Hal Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ managing general partner, wrote to The Post’s George King in an email Monday. “I have also indicated for many years my desire to bring payroll down close to or under the [luxury tax] threshold level. I would not attempt to do that, however, at the expense of fielding a competitive team.”
Steinbrenner honored those words three offseasons ago, and the Yankees and their followers are still paying the price for that lack of discipline. At a moment when they probably would have been best served instituting the type of middle-road, develop-while-contending model they’re currently deploying — imagine if they had re-signed Robinson Cano and inked Masahiro Tanaka while passing on Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury and Brian McCann, thereby getting under the luxury-tax threshold — they instead went full drunken sailor. Whereas Cano remains a Mariners asset, Ellsbury stands as a full-blown pinstriped liability, the last albatross on this roster.
Now Steinbrenner seems more determined than ever to beat the threshold and reset the team’s tax rate. The Yankees won’t get under the $195 million threshold this season; even with the AP calculating the current payroll at $195 million, you have to throw in another $16 million for minorleague call-ups, insurance and pension. Next year, though, Alex Rodriguez ($27.5 million), CC Sabathia ($24.4 million) and Matt Holliday ($13 million) headline the group of guys coming off the books, and with the threshold crawling up a smidge to $197 million, that gives the Yankees considerable wiggle room to pay no tax on their 2018 group and subsequently spend big on at least one player from the stellar free- agent class likely to include Bryce Harper, Clayton Kershaw and Manny Machado.
Combine that process with their current trove of promising youngsters, and the Yankees hope to put themselves on track to have a Cubs-like embarrassment of riches.
If they don’t own the No. 1 payroll at the end of their journey, they’ll be close. This past winter, during which the Yankees doled out the second-highest free-agent contact ($86 million) to bring back Aroldis Chapman, they hinted strongly that all teams are headed south out of respect for the new collective bargaining agreement which heavily penalizes exorbitance. The Dodgers lead the pack at $225 million, yet that marks their lowest figure since 2013. The Tigers’ $199.75 million figure will decline moving forward, no doubt. While Steinbrenner’s “We don’t need a $200 million payroll” line has become his mantra, the clear priority for 2019 and beyond will be to stay within $20 million of the threshold, which tops out at $210 million in 2021. A surtax kicks in at that $20 million-over mark — right now, only the Dodgers are on pace for this — and it’s hard to envision any team taking that on with gusto.
The Yankees are where they are primarily because they spent poorly, not because they underspent, in the past. Their future success depends upon investing both plentifully and intelligently. Dropping to third place in this particular category, at this particular time, feels more savvy than stingy. But we’ll be watching to make sure the vision pays off. And pays the players.