You still can’t buy a World Series championship in baseball, as hard as teams like the Dodgers and Mets and Yankees and Phillies and even the Red Sox, when they were still spending big, keep trying. Fact is that over the past 10 years, only two teams with the largest payroll in the land — ’18 Red Sox, ’20 Dodgers — have won it all. Even last season, the Dodgers only had the third-largest payroll on the books, after the Yankees and Mets.
Of course Steve Cohen is in there swinging away with his wallet, as Mets fans can see. But they also see that despite having the largest payrolls in the sport in 2023 and ’24 and having the second-largest as the ’25 regular season is about to begin, according to Spotrac’s numbers, the Mets still haven’t won the Series in nearly 40 years, even coming up just two wins shy of making the Series a year ago.
Over the past decade, we’ve seen the Astros win two Series, one with only the 17th priciest payroll and another time with the 8th. We’ve seen the Nationals win at No. 7 and the Cubs win at No. 5 and the Braves win at No. 11 and the Rangers win at No. 4. So it’s more than money buying happiness even though, as is so often said, it will clearly finance an exhaustive search.
One of the reasons is that the money can’t buy good health, especially with pitching, as Cohen’s Mets are finding out in real time with injuries to Sean Manaea, who likely would have been their Opening Day starter before an oblique injury, and with Frankie Montas, another offseason acquisition who was supposed to be in the rotation, out until May. Cohen surely would be willing to buy more pitching if he could, but he can’t at this point.
And, by the way, he might not ever be able to spend the way he’s spent already after next season, even in this time when he’s turned into Guggenheim Partners (the Dodgers owner) East. The reason is simple, as counterintuitive as it may seem with what the Mets payrolls have looked like since Cohen bought the Mets:
Cohen might be perfectly willing to line up with both owners rich and poor to finally get a salary cap in baseball as a way of truly leveling the playing field, and that could very well mean shutting down the sport to do it after the current collective bargaining agreement expires at the end of next season. At that point even Cohen, as rich as he is, which means richer than just about everybody else in his sport, might be willing to get right at the front of the line and stop spending for the good of the sport.
Right now, this minute, the Dodgers’ payroll is at $321 million or so and the Mets are right there behind them at $314 million. But the Dodgers haven’t just loaded up on offensive stars at the top of their batting order the way the Mets have done, they are loaded with pitching, at this time when the Mets are not, and won’t be when the season begins for them in Houston March 27.
“I’d like to get below the Cohen tax,” Cohen said last week in Port St. Lucie, referencing the luxury tax introduced by baseball three years ago. … “I’m sure it’s about me. But there’s a lot of Cohens out there.”
But the only payrolls over $300 million belong to Cohen and Guggenheim Partners, with the Phillies and Yankees in third and fourth places but still under $300 million. Can you make it to the postseason without spending with both hands? Sure you can. The two teams the Yankees defeated in last year’s postseason on their way to facing the Dodgers in the World Series were the Royals and the Guardians, whose combined payroll was $228 million. But if you think the sides looked remotely even in either one of those series, send up a flare, by all means.
When the Yankees did get to the Series, and as much as they will always want to talk about Freddie Freeman’s grand slam in Game 1 and the roof caving in on them in the fifth inning of Game 5, they got rolled by a better — and richer — baseball team.
And yet this is also true: For all the money the Dodgers spend on baseball players last season, they spent that season watching one pitcher after another end up on the IL, no matter how much money some of those pitchers were making, from Clayton Kershaw to Yoshinobu Yamamoto, their $325 million man. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s pretty much the same contract Gerrit Cole has with the Yankees, coming off a season when he got hurt and didn’t pitch until June.
Because of all those pitching injuries, the Dodgers were forced into a bullpen game with their season on the line in their Division Series against the Padres, down two games to one. They were that close to being out of business. And then, with all the big names on their roster, and not just on the pitching staff, here are the pitchers who saved them, in formation: Ryan Brasier, Anthony Banda, Michael Kopech, Alex Vesia, Evan Phillips, Daniel Hudson, Blake Treinen and Landon Knack.
Now they have added Blake Snell and more bullpen and have a staff so much deeper than the Mets it’s not close and even though Cohen and his man David Stearns would like to have reinforcements overnighted to Port St. Lucie by Amazon, no matter what the cost, they can’t.
We know Cohen is willing to spend, see “Juan Soto, $765 million.” We’ll find out by year’s end if he spent enough. And by the year after that if he can keep spending as much as he wants.
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