COHEN AND SEIDLER ARE GOOD FOR BASEBALL — STRAGGLERS, GO AWAY
The sport never has been more top-heavy financially, after payroll splurges by the Mets and mid-market Padres, and Little Spenders demanding reform should face the music: Invest big or get off the pot
Not to say the New York Mets are Chelsea and the Oakland Athletics are pre-Hollywood Wrexham, but what we have on our shores is the framework of English football relegation. See the pyramid? The disparity between the top-spending franchises and bottom feeders has grown so grotesquely gaping in baseball — up to $300 million between them this season — that it’s wrong to brand all 30 teams as “Major League.”
Hell, several could settle for Ted Lasso as their manager.
Anyone who visits the toilet bowl in the East Bay — known as RingCentral Coliseum, which obviously has nothing to do with sports bling — knows there are minor-league shops within a short drive that offer more refined experiences for much less money. How brutal? A Hall of Fame second baseman, if he were alive, might be dismayed to know the ballpark address is 7000 Joe Morgan Way. And yet, the Athletics charge major-league prices — like the Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds, Kansas City Royals and others of their lowly ilk — when they’ll be in last place by April Fools’ Day in a regular season that starts March 30.
The standings may as well be listed in tiers. On this 27th of February, more than seven months before the playoffs, there is, in effect, a Super League of eight clubs, seven on pace to exceed a Competitive Balance Tax threshold of $233 million. Most likely, your 2023 champion will come from a group of wealth supremacy that includes the Mets, whose projected payroll already is $369.9 million; the New York Yankees, at $288.5 million; the San Diego Padres, at $274.1 million; the Philadelphia Phillies, at $251.2 million; the Toronto Blue Jays, at $247.3 million; the Los Angeles Dodgers, at $244.7 million; the Atlanta Braves, at $233.4 million; and, not far behind at $213.2 million, the defending champions. The Houston Astros are so adept at handling a payroll — without electronically stealing signs, banging trash cans or needing a steady general manager who gets along with a crusty owner — that they might become the sport’s first repeat titleists since 2000.
Just as America is divided more than ever by haves and have-nots, so is the baseball economy. Unlike the NFL colossus, which benefits from a hard salary cap and tens of billions in media revenue shared between 32 franchises, MLB is a scattered industry of mansions, condos and encampments. An overstatement, that is not. The recent invasion of Steve Cohen, who has directed a portion of his $17 billion in net worth toward Mets payrolls unprecedented in immensity, only has exposed the comparatively smaller net worth of other owners.
Per Statista.com, a dozen fall short of $2 billion, including two in Chicago, Tom Ricketts ($1.8 billion) and Jerry Reinsdorf ($1.5 billion) who have been derided for parsimonious spending in a larger market. Nine of the dozen are worth less than $1.3 billion — including Kansas City’s John Sherman, Seattle’s John Stanton, Pittsburgh’s Bob Nutting and Tampa Bay’s Stuart Sternberg. And five of the dozen are worth less than, ouch, $700 million: Colorado’s Dick Monfort, Milwaukee’s Mark Attanasio, Arizona’s Ken Kendrick, Miami’s Bruce Sherman and, in the basement, Cincinnati’s Bob Castellini at $400 million. True, they are supported by investors, but not enough to change their status in the financial pecking order. Most of those men will see their teams crash early this season, the World Series a continuing pipedream.
So, if 22 clubs already are eliminated from championship glory while richer organizations do the biggest spending, what exactly is the point of spring training, 162-game schedules and refreshingly seismic rules changes in the Pitch Clock era? Ideally, the 10 worst teams — often those with the lowest payrolls — would be relegated to playing each other in an inferior playpen until worthy of a promotion to the legitimate major leagues. Of course, that isn’t happening, but it doesn’t mean we can’t use our collective brainpower to devise a better way. Look, if average game times can be reduced by almost a half-hour — as seen in the first weekend of exhibitions in Arizona and Florida — we can nudge commissioner Rob Manfred and well-heeled owners to a logical solution.
That is: Pressure less-heeled owners to sell their teams and get out of the game. Otherwise, after three more seasons of labor peace, the sport will lurk toward another labor impasse in 2026. With local TV money shriveling up and baseball fast-fading as a national attraction, survival will depend on bringing in more uber-rich owners serious about winning and spending — such as Cohen. Or, to a slightly less lavish extent, Peter Seidler, who hasn’t let his $3 billion net worth and San Diego’s mid-market profile interfere with relentless spending sprees. The latest monster contract went to Manny Machado, who demanded an 11-year, $350 million extension for no other reason than, as he said, “markets change.” Already, Seidler is on the hook for more than $600 million for problem child Fernando Tatis Jr. and Xander Bogaerts and intends to keep Juan Soto for upwards of $450 million. He also locked in nine-figure extensions for pitchers Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove. This offseason, Seidler has doled out more than $1 billion.
“They’ve believed in me since Day 1, and here we are,” a sated Machado said Sunday. “We’re excited to be here for the rest of our career and have this hat going into the Hall of Fame.”
Seidler is trying to buy championships — winning being the prime function of sports ownership, which many in his brethren have forgotten. So are Cohen and Philadelphia’s John Middleton, who soothed the pain of Phillies fans after falling just short in the World Series by throwing $300 million at difference-maker Trea Turner. The binges have prompted an outcry among owners not in the Serious Tier, who’ve pushed Manfred to create an “economic reform committee’’ allowing owners to yell at each other in rooms. Nutting, reviled in Pittsburgh for letting the Pirates rot in a proud sports town, already has said, “We’ve got to see fundamental change in the economic structure of the game.” Monfort, who hopes to “play .500 ball” this season as a historically non-competitive team lags in Denver, called out the Big Spenders, saying, “What the Padres are doing, I don’t 100 percent agree with, though I know our fans probably agree with it.”
Ah, the fans. Remember them? The happiest fans in baseball are those who root for the Mets, Padres, Phillies and other teams that sink substantial profits into the payroll. The unhappiest fans are those with owners who don’t commit nearly as much, if any at all, to improving teams. Those are the owners who should get out. And maybe they will, once they realize their gripes won’t impact how the Big Spenders do business. “I’ve heard what everyone else has heard, that they’re not happy with me,” Cohen told ESPN. “I kind of look at that like, you’re looking at the wrong person. They’re putting it on me. Maybe they need to look more at themselves.” When a new plateau in the CBT was installed in the latest collective bargaining agreement, it was dubbed the “Steve Cohen tax.” It should be called the Cohen-Seidler tax.
“Putting a great and winning team on the field in San Diego year after year is sustainable. … I don’t spend too much time, if any, thinking about what other people are thinking,” Seidler said. “We have a great chance to go after that trophy and to deliver to San Diego its first parade, and with a great deal of seriousness and humility. But the overall theme is we’re here to win a title. That’s what I expect.”
Do the math. In a town that lost the NFL Chargers and NBA Clippers to Los Angeles, why not turn the Padres into a civic obsession and Petco Park into a revenue reservoir? Seidler has sold more than 23,000 full season tickets and could peddle many more if he didn’t limit the number. He is force-feeding the concept that a monster payroll can lead to multiple titles regardless of market size. Isn’t this what good owners are supposed to do? If the bad owners can’t follow suit, then sell. “Our situation is unique,” Seidler said. “We have a very sports-oriented and hungry fan base, and we believe if we continue to build that trust, they’ll continue to come. When we talk about risk, there’s a risk to doing nothing. And we’ve chosen to really focus on the players, and what spawned out of that is this amazing relationship between our players and our fans. The players respond to the fans, and as we’ve seen, the fans go nuts when they get to watch our players perform.”
Leave it to Cohen to extrapolate current economic conditions in America and relate them to his industry. “There was inflation prices,” he said. “I did not expect, what happened. All of a sudden — I think it’s interesting because I had mentioned to, at baseball, the possibility that inflation might matter, given the inflation we saw in the general economy. And all of a sudden, we were looking at prices up 20, 30 percent. And, I mean, that was — that was a shocker to me, and certainly changed our plans, and I had to think differently: $300 million, which is still a lot of money, didn’t get us (what) it used to. … You gotta be flexible. You gotta be adaptable, and that’s how I do things.”
How he does things doesn’t please owners of all sorts, including those in places accustomed to sizable payrolls. The Red Sox have slumped to 12th in projections, at $210.8 million, and fans who pay whopping prices in a highly competitive Boston sports market aren’t happy with owner John Henry. He broke the Curse of the Bambino and won four World Series between 2004 and 2018. To New Englanders, that’s ancient history and he must consider selling. “The system needs change,” said Henry, whose Fenway Sports Group is valued at more than $6 billion and counts LeBron James as an investor.
Most baseball owners think Cohen and Seidler aren’t good for the game. In truth, they are GREAT for the game, pumping money into the paradigm and putting smiles on local faces. The four owners who opposed Cohen’s takeover of the Mets are among MLB’s worst: Castellini, Reinsdorf, Kendrick and Arte Moreno, who explored selling the Orange County Angels to no avail in the offseason. The sport has reached a crossroads. Roaring down the tracks in speed trains are men who want to win at any cost. Anyone stopped at the crossing signals should turn around and go home.
A salary cap isn’t coming — if the union has its way, as if often does during negotiations. “We’re never going to agree to a cap,” said Tony Clark, executive director of the MLB Players Association. “A salary cap is the ultimate restriction on player value and player salary. We believe in a market system. The market system has served our players, our teams and our game very well.” He wants owners to study what’s happening in San Diego instead of protesting to the sound of crickets.
Of the Padres, Clark said, “They should be celebrated, not questioned. The question that should be asked in regards to one team's payroll versus another is whether or not that team is making a conscious decision to have its payroll there or whether it has the ability to increase its payroll. There were teams that historically people would say couldn't, and they have, and in a world where there are organizations that have had success, that have had payrolls markedly higher than they have now when they have that success and yet the industry has grown, begs the questions of whether they can or they can’t.”
Even Manfred refuses to criticize Cohen. The Little Spenders should take a hint. “I mean, look — whether we should have, or shouldn’t have, right, we bought in again to a system that lacked absolute upward limitation on what people can spend,” he said. “And, I mean, I said this at the owners’ meeting: I think our owners understand, that’s what we agreed to. And he can do what he wants to do within the context of that system.”
So can anyone else. Hmmm. Having watched actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney resurrect a fifth-tier Welsh soccer club and transform Wrexham into a tourist hub, I suggest we turn them loose in MLB. Same goes for Mark Cuban, who has wanted to buy his hometown Pirates but is blocked each time by owners who support Nutting. Same with Jeff Bezos, prevented from buying the NFL’s Washington Commanders by owner Dan Snyder, who holds a grudge for various exposes alleged in the Bezos-owned Washington Post.
About 2,700 billionaires live on this planet, with more to come. Baseball’s problems are nothing that a few of them can’t fix. But before it can happen, the Little Spenders must be steamrolled into putting teams on the market, which is why we encourage the Big Spenders to keep splurging, all day and every day.
The more agita, the better.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.