Giants, A’s not keeping up with big spenders

Kansas City beat Cincinnati in the semis and will play for the championship. That’s a sentence fully accepted in football, but it would be farfetched in baseball.

For MLB’s Royals and Reds, it’s unlikely either team from those relatively small markets with penurious owners could get that close to a World Series in the current competitive environment.

The Chiefs and Bengals, on the other hand, are not surprising to find among the NFL’s elite. The two teams met in the AFC Championship Game, and no one seemed alarmed. The Royals or Reds in a League Championship Series? That would be stunning.

Unless baseball economics drastically change — and they won’t any time soon — the Chiefs and Bengals will continue to have a far better chance at reaching and winning the Super Bowl than the Royals and Reds do for a World Series.

Baseball’s payroll disparity is wider than ever, and neither the competitive balance tax nor its revenue-sharing system is doing much to narrow the gap. Consequently, the Kansas City and Cincinnati clubs have payrolls one-fifth that of the New York Mets. The Oakland Athletics’

payroll is nearly $300 million less than what the Mets will pay their players this season.

That’s just not a thing in the NFL or NBA because those leagues have salary caps and stricter boundaries on spending at both the upper and lower ends of team payrolls.

In baseball, pretty much anything goes. The CBT was supposed to be a deterrent for owners, a de facto salary cap, but it hardly seems to matter, especially for Mets owner Steve Cohen, who is out-Steinbrenner-ing the sons of George Steinbrenner, emerging as New York’s new boss.

This offseason brought new levels of spending, with nine nine-digit deals handed out. Even Brandon Nimmo, who has played more than 100 games just twice in seven years, got one, courtesy of Cohen.

It’s a major problem for the industry. Not because of Cohen and other owners willing to pay what it takes to improve their ballclubs, but because of all the other owners who aren’t.

As a result, most teams will begin the season with no hope or faith in competing for a championship, even with 12 teams making the playoffs, an absolute bummer for fans throughout the game.

In this day and age, it should be embarrassing for any organization not to commit to at least $100 million in payroll. In a perfect world, teams without one would undergo ownership changes.

This isn’t just about A’s owner John Fisher, who’s worth $2.4 billion, yet won’t spend many pennies on his baseball team and continues to flirt with a Las Vegas relocation. Ten other teams have sub-$100 million payrolls. Other than the brainiac Tampa Bay Rays, we can count ’em all out now.

While big payrolls don’t guarantee success, they sure help. Little payrolls make it nearly impossible to succeed. So instead of blaming Cohen for driving up the price of premier players, fans ought to blame their own owners for failing to keep up.

The San Diego Padres get it. So does their owner, Peter Seidler. They don’t play in a major market, but they act like they do, and it’s no surprise they’re succeeding, not just on the field but at the gate. While the San Francisco Giants’ FanFest drew between 10,000 and 12,000 — and the A’s didn’t even have one — the Padres drew 48,000 fans to theirs and spoke of making it a two-day event next year.

The Padres play in the 27th biggest media market yet have the fourth-highest payroll behind the Mets, Yankees and Phillies, just ahead of the Dodgers. Trying to bring their first championship to San Diego, the Padres signed shortstop Xander Bogaerts for $280 million, invested $72 million to retain pitchers Robert Suarez and Nick Martinez and are handing a six-year, $108 million extension to 36-year-old starter Yu Darvish.

These aren’t your mother’s or father’s Padres. They have become such a must-see team that they are creating a season-ticket wait list for the first time in history.

The Giants tried to give their money away, but with Aaron Judge’s heart in the Bronx and Carlos Correa’s physical a tangle of doubt, they settled for a bevy of other players, including outfielders Michael Conforto and Mitch Haniger and pitchers Sean Manaea, Ross Stripling and Taylor Rogers.

The Giants’ payroll, considering their resources and revenue, not to mention owner Charles

Johnson’s $5.4 billion worth, isn’t where it should be in the top five, as one of the top five most financially valuable franchises. It’s barely in the top 10.

Clearly, many payrolls aren’t keeping up with all the new revenue that owners are receiving from, to name a few, the two extra playoff teams, streaming deals with Apple and Peacock and advertising that will be displayed on jerseys and helmets.

At the owners’ meetings this past week in Palm Beach, Fla., MLB introduced its new economic study committee that examines revenue disparity and local broadcasting rights. Payrolls totaled a record $4.56 billion last season and will eclipse that in 2023 because Cohen — whose projected $370 million payroll will shatter the previous record of the 2015 Dodgers, $291 million — and some other owners are paying to win.

The problem is, most owners stood by during the offseason and watched the high rollers do their thing. Cohen will pay more in luxury taxes than some owners invest in payroll. These owners don’t need to spend like Cohen, but it would benefit the industry and appease their fan bases to spend enough to make their teams contenders.

If they continue to refuse, move aside and let somebody else own the team.