Ha.
Haha.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
All offseason, we heard about the New York Mets. Much of this was from the New York Mets. “We’re spending,” their actions said. “We’re spending enough to win now while still investing in rebuilding our organizational infrastructure, which really needs rebuilding.” It was refreshing for fans. Finally, ownership was running a team the way fans would if they had the kind of resources MLB owners have. Of course, fans aren’t professionals, and had this been framed as “a team run by fans” rather than “the best team money can buy,” the Mets’ 35–43 record three days before the season’s halfway point wouldn’t be surprising.
Still, we’re…hearing about the Mets?
We’re going to get to what’s actually gone wrong for the Mets in a minute, but first, we need to get angry about something. Steve Cohen made MLB owners panic this offseason. Articles ran rampant about whether the Mets’ willingness to pay the luxury tax was going to ruin the sport. The articles were fair enough. It was a legitimate question. We’d never seen someone laugh as hard as Steve Cohen laughed at the luxury tax, and without having seen it before, we didn’t know what would come next. Usually, owners throw out the phrase “luxury tax” as though it’s what Major League Baseball intends it to appear to be: A sort of salary cap. It isn’t that, of course, its penalties are gentle unless you really laugh at it (the way Steve Cohen did), but it’s a big phrase that points towards numbers, and people don’t like looking at numbers. So, owners use the phrase “luxury tax” when what they’re really doing is refusing to chase championships as aggressively as they could, even though chasing championships like Cohen is chasing championships still leaves MLB owners with a spectacular return on their investment.
Now, we’re finding out what comes next. We’re finding out what happens when a team spends this much money. The results contradict the narrative. The narrative is wrong. You can spend a lot of money and still lose a lot of ballgames. Yet we’re still getting these stupid fucking articles.
Take this one from Jesse Rogers at ESPN a few weeks ago: MLB is a sport divided by historic payroll disparity – so what’s next? The article starts with a picture of Francisco Lindor approaching home plate after a home run, reminding readers that this is about a team who’s spending three hundred fifty million dollars to occupy twelfth place in the National League. Its third paragraph mentions the tiny payroll of the 2022 Baltimore Orioles, who went on an historic second-half run and finished three games out of the playoffs. The article cannot be serious. It must not be serious. And yet, it seems to be serious? Or as serious as is par for the course for a cynical shill like Rogers who knows who gives him his scoops.
The argument—one popularized by Bud Selig in an effort to excuse his woeful ownership of the Brewers and well-chronicled in the early chapters of Moneyball, in which Billy Beane said, in different words, “That’s ridiculous, I don’t need money to win 90 games a year”—goes that if MLB payrolls are allowed to separate to great extremes, competition will suffer. Selig, God bless him, loves the game of baseball in a way that Rob Manfred has probably never loved anything, but Selig, God bless him, was one of the least successful owners in the history of any professional sport. The man only made the playoffs twice in more than thirty years of ownership. Bud Selig loves baseball, but goodness was he a bad owner, and unfortunately for the sport, he used his own terrible record as justification in his successful push for league-wide subsidization of incompetence, which has now turned into league-wide subsidization of a few owners who refuse to try to compete.
The Selig argument is one which makes all the sense in the world in one sentence and has never borne out in the real world. Since 2000, the Diamondbacks, Marlins, Rockies, Rays, Royals, and Guardians have each made at least one World Series, and half those teams have won a title. Between the 2001 and 2020 seasons, the A’s made the playoffs at a 50% clip and won 90 games or the Covid equivalent nine times. Right now, baseball could probably use less parity, with no repeat World Series champions since 2000 and casual fans unfamiliar with the current best and teams, which seem to rotate like flavors of the month. If players want to exchange a salary cap for a salary floor, they should do what they want, but that’s a separate discussion. With the system what it is, owners are making money hand over fist, and that’s their right as owners, but they’ve also established what’s more or less a cartel controlling the sport of baseball in America, and many are lying about how much cash they’re raking in. It’s possible to make a lot of money in the baseball industry without winning or even seeming to try to compete. Bob Nutting, owner of the 35–42 Pittsburgh Pirates, is doing it. John Fisher, owner of the soon-to-be Las Vegas Athletics, is doing it. Jerry Reinsdorf, clown chief of the “We tried to sign Manny Machado, we swear!” Chicago White Sox is doing it. The revenue sharing that enables this grift is an understated part of Selig’s legacy. The real estate gambits that empower it are likely to be a large part of Rob Manfred’s.
I’ve said a lot here, and I think it’s important, and I don’t think it’s described accurately enough often enough because of the insider nature of mainstream baseball media and the wacky sociopolitical worldview of much of the blogosphere. To put it succinctly, then:
- Thanks to revenue sharing and real estate revenue, it’s possible to make tons of money as an MLB owner even if your team is routinely among the worst in the league. This is why sale prices for MLB franchises have increased so dramatically over the last few decades. They are a reliably hugely profitable investment, and becuase of the real estate piece of this value, the money stadiums make and the money any team-owned real estate around stadiums make, some owners like to say, “Actually, we’re losing money, our baseball expenses are higher than our baseball incomes,” when that neglects a gigantic source of profit.
- MLB owners decide who else gets to be an MLB owner, blockading owners who will upset the status quo.
- Steve Cohen, owner of the New York Mets, surprised the cartel and upset the status quo this offseason, so now other owners are using their unofficial spokespeople in the media—people like Jesse Rogers, who relies on his connections for the breaking news scoops that keep him employed—to push a narrative which says that unequal spending on payroll is going to drive the sport into the ground.
- The Mets stink, but the narrative is still being pushed.
- The Orioles are good, but the narrative is still being pushed.
- The Mets stink!
- The Mets stink!!!
Ok, more fun stuff now.
What exactly *has* gone wrong for the New York Mets?
The market price per win in Major League Baseball is somewhere in the neighborhood of eight million dollars. A player who’s making sixteen million dollars should net his team roughly two wins of value per year over the value offered by a replacement-level player. With the season conveniently half over, this gives us an opportunity. Let’s look at each Met’s salary and each Met’s fWAR, and then let’s point and laugh some more and ask Julian McGrath-Gerrity to say the line.
| Player | 2023 Salary | 2023 Mets fWAR | 2023 Mets Production Pace ($) | Mets Over/Underpay |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Justin Verlander | $43,333,333 | 0.7 | $11,200,000 | $32,133,333 |
| Max Scherzer | $43,333,333 | 1.1 | $17,600,000 | $25,733,333 |
| Francisco Lindor | $34,100,000 | 2.3 | $36,800,000 | $-2,700,000 |
| Edwin Díaz | $21,250,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $21,250,000 |
| Starling Marte | $20,750,000 | 0.2 | $3,200,000 | $17,550,000 |
| Robinson Canó | $20,250,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $20,250,000 |
| Brandon Nimmo | $18,500,000 | 2.0 | $32,000,000 | $-13,500,000 |
| Kodai Senga | $15,666,667 | 1.0 | $16,000,000 | $-333,333 |
| Pete Alonso | $14,500,000 | 1.6 | $25,600,000 | $-11,100,000 |
| Carlos Carrasco | $14,000,000 | -0.6 | $-9,600,000 | $23,600,000 |
| José Quintana | $13,000,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $13,000,000 |
| Mark Canha | $11,500,000 | 0.3 | $4,800,000 | $6,700,000 |
| Orioles (James McCann trade) | $11,000,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $11,000,000 |
| David Robertson | $10,000,000 | 1.0 | $16,000,000 | $-6,000,000 |
| Omar Narváez | $8,000,000 | -0.1 | $-1,600,000 | $9,600,000 |
| Adam Ottavino | $7,750,000 | -0.1 | $-1,600,000 | $9,350,000 |
| Jeff McNeil | $6,250,000 | 0.8 | $12,800,000 | $-6,550,000 |
| Tommy Pham | $6,000,000 | 0.7 | $11,200,000 | $-5,200,000 |
| Angels (Eduardo Escobar trade) | $4,720,430 | 0.0 | $0 | $4,720,430 |
| Brooks Raley | $4,500,000 | 0.1 | $1,600,000 | $2,900,000 |
| Eduardo Escobar | $4,392,473 | 0.2 | $3,200,000 | $1,192,473 |
| Taijuan Walker | $3,000,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $3,000,000 |
| Darin Ruf | $2,891,613 | 0.0 | $0 | $2,891,613 |
| Tomás Nido | $1,600,000 | -0.6 | $-9,600,000 | $11,200,000 |
| Elieser Hernández | $1,600,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $1,600,000 |
| Luis Guillorme | $1,600,000 | 0.2 | $3,200,000 | $-1,600,000 |
| Daniel Vogelbach | $1,500,000 | -0.2 | $-3,200,000 | $4,700,000 |
| Mychal Givens | $1,500,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $1,500,000 |
| Tim Locastro | $1,400,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $1,400,000 |
| Drew Smith | $1,300,000 | -0.1 | $-1,600,000 | $2,900,000 |
| Joey Lucchesi | $1,150,000 | 0.1 | $1,600,000 | $-450,000 |
| Danny Mendick | $1,000,000 | -0.1 | $-1,600,000 | $2,600,000 |
| Dennis Santana | $1,000,000 | -0.1 | $-1,600,000 | $2,600,000 |
| John Curtiss | $775,000 | -0.1 | $-1,600,000 | $2,375,000 |
| Sam Coonrod | $775,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $775,000 |
| Jeff Brigham | $760,000 | -0.2 | $-3,200,000 | $3,960,000 |
| David Peterson | $750,000 | 0.2 | $3,200,000 | $-2,450,000 |
| Mark Vientos | $720,000 | -0.4 | $-6,400,000 | $7,120,000 |
| Stephen Nogosek | $720,000 | -0.4 | $-6,400,000 | $7,120,000 |
| Dominic Leone | $720,000 | -0.3 | $-4,800,000 | $5,520,000 |
| Denyi Reyes | $720,000 | -0.1 | $-1,600,000 | $2,320,000 |
| Jose Butto | $720,000 | -0.1 | $-1,600,000 | $2,320,000 |
| Jimmy Yacabonis | $720,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $720,000 |
| Vinny Nittoli | $720,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $720,000 |
| Zach Muckenhirn | $720,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $720,000 |
| Edwin Uceta | $720,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $720,000 |
| Josh Walker | $720,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $720,000 |
| Grant Hartwig | $720,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $720,000 |
| Tylor Megill | $720,000 | 0.1 | $1,600,000 | $-880,000 |
| Michael Perez | $720,000 | 0.3 | $4,800,000 | $-4,080,000 |
| Brett Baty | $720,000 | 0.5 | $8,000,000 | $-7,280,000 |
| Francisco Alvarez | $720,000 | 1.1 | $17,600,000 | $-16,880,000 |
| Tommy Hunter | $696,236 | -0.3 | $-4,800,000 | $5,496,236 |
| Chris Bassitt | $150,000 | 0.0 | $0 | $150,000 |
| Gary Sánchez | $80,645 | -0.1 | $-1,600,000 | $1,680,645 |
Some notes on this table:
- We took salaries from RosterResource on FanGraphs and assigned league minimum salaries to all players not listed (the quadrupel-A guys).
- “Salary” isn’t a great word, but it worked well in the table. What this is, really, is a list of where the Mets’ money is going. The $359 million. ($367 million in the table but that’s because of complications with the league minimum guys, don’t worry about that, that isn’t affecting anything meaningful in this discussion.) Some of this is salaries, some is buyouts, some is cash transactions from trades. It’s all money, and it’s all part of their gigantic payroll figure this year.
- There are some weird cases in here of how to measure value. For the James McCann money, do we assign that to James McCann himself? Do we assign it to the catchers filling its role? When it wasn’t directly clear, we erred on the side of leaving the raw numbers.
Ok, the fun stuff:
The biggest problem for the Mets is their pitching. Not only is it bad—second-worst in the Majors—but they’re spending a lot of money on it. Three of their four highest-paid players are pitchers, and while Edwin Díaz and Justin Verlander have each missed time (Díaz is missing the whole season), Verlander and Max Scherzer and Carlos Carrasco are all underperforming. The Mets, based on that rough $8M/WAR figure, were expecting five more wins from these guys alone.
The Mets are getting a lot of production out of their pre-free agent bats. Francisco Alvarez, Brandon Nimmo, and Pete Alonso have contributed nearly half the team’s overall fWAR. That’s one of the funny things about this list. It’ll happen with any team, because of how baseball’s CBA is structured, but there are a lot of players playing beyond their salaries. The Mets are getting $80M worth of extra production from everyone from David Robertson to Brett Baty and they’re still this bad.
The Mets are spending a lot of money on guys no longer with the organization. Between the payments to the players themselves and cash considerations from the trades, the Mets are spending a combined $46M associated with Robinson Canó, James McCann, Eduardo Escobar, Taijuan Walker, and Darin Ruf. That’s nearly three quarters of the Orioles’ entire payroll.
The Mets have some significant salaries injured in Díaz and José Quintana, but that’s not that many guys. In a fun new twist, injuries aren’t really the issue with this particular crop of Mets.
Starling Marte is underperforming, Francisco Lindor is not.
The Mets have 17 players with negative fWAR. I believe only the A’s have used more players below replacement level this year. This is partially quirky and tied to how many relievers each team shuttles through its bullpen, but even just limiting it to the guys whose salaries are confirmed on RosterResource, the Mets have spent $38M on players below replacement level.
So, that’s where the money’s gone. The two highest-paid players on the team haven’t been that good. A few others—Carrasco most notably—have been abysmal. Díaz and Quintana are hurt. There’s a lot of money already out the door to clean up past mistakes. The bones of the roster aren’t that bad—a rotation headed by Scherzer, Verlander, and Kodai Senga is a pretty good start, and Lindor and Nimmo and Alonso and Alvarez and Jeff McNeil are a solid positional core, and Robertson continues to rock out of the bullpen. But the Mets have overpaid, and the organizational infrastructure they’ve acknowledged as an issue—managing, developmental stuff, training stuff, scouting, all those things that make the Rays so damn deep beyond the 40-man roster—appears to be playing a significant role based on how widespread the underperformance is and the sheer quantity of disappointing individual players promoted to the MLB level this year. The roster’s still good—it’s the fifth-best in baseball on paper, per FanGraphs’s Depth Charts—so some of this is bad luck, but again: It’s only fifth-best on paper. Money can only buy you so much.
What’s This NCAA News?
One way to describe the NCAA is that it administers college sports. Colleges want to have sports, colleges want central governing bodies in these sports, colleges want these central governing bodies to to streamline processes. Make rules, build championships formats, etc. Enter: Conferences at the regional level, and the NCAA nationally.
“Administer college sports” is a vague mandate, and at some point around 1950 the NCAA transformed from a parliament-like system to something more resembling a business. Officially a nonprofit, the NCAA is capable of paying its president upwards of two million dollars a year. It’s a business.
Things are different because the NCAA is a business. Were it more democratic and more a product of a social contract, schools would likely jockey with one another to shape college sports in ways which suited their preference. Instead, schools jockey with the NCAA over this, and the NCAA’s real mandate is self-preservation. The NCAA wants to continue to exist. That, ultimately, is what every business is after.
To continue to exist, the NCAA needs to make sure the valuable schools don’t leave and start a rival organization. A few rival organizations do exist—NAIA sports are a thing, for example—but they don’t have the valuable schools. In this case, though, a school’s value depends in large part on the bloc in which that school operates. A few big schools are valuable together. A lot of medium schools might be valuable together. The NCAA wants to keep them all in the NCAA. If it does that, it gets to keep being the NCAA. If it doesn’t, if too many schools leave, it ceases to be the NCAA and some other body originates to replace it, likely through each defecting school sending a representative to a committee and that committee establishing rules and so on and so forth, kind of like how a forest regrows after a wildfire.
So, the NCAA’s most immediate goal at all times is to keep the near totality of its member schools happy enough to stay in the NCAA.
I think it’s useful to bring this lens to things like today’s announcement that the NCAA will continue to enforce its rules against schools paying players directly, even if those rules conflict with state laws. Specifically, Stan Wilcox—the NCAA executive VP of regulatory affairs—sent out a letter (probably an email) saying schools’ independent but affiliated NIL collectives can’t pay players themselves, boosters can’t pitch recruits with specific NIL opportunities, and NIL contracts can’t be legally tied to an athlete playing for a specific school or—as a workaround—living in a specific geographic area. That isn’t an exhaustive list, but those are the big ones.
The NCAA is talking a big game here. Were they to enforce these rules, it would constitute a major shift from how NIL currently operates at a lot of schools. Legal under state law or not, boosters and NIL collectives are connecting recruits with payments. The rules aren’t really changing, but the NCAA is saying it’s going to enforce them, and that’s a bit of a pivot from the last few years.
There are a few questions to ask here, and the first one is: Why?
The NCAA isn’t changing its rules. The rules have been there, the rules are still there, this was a threatening letter reminding schools of the rules and offering clarifications on how the NCAA will enforce them, not an informative letter telling schools of new rules. It’s going out now because Texas and a few other states are legalizing a lot of NIL stuff. The states aren’t merely saying they won’t enforce their own legal boundaries between boosters and recruits or between boosters and schools. They’re explicitly legalizing many practices. In response, the NCAA is telling schools, “We don’t care what your state law says. You play by our rules.”
The second question is also: Why?
If the NCAA’s motive is self-preservation, it doesn’t make sense at a glance to tell certain schools they can’t do the thing they just successfully lobbied their state government to empower them to do. Those schools will be pissed, right? Pissed schools might leave the NCAA?
The key here is, I would guess, the part we wrote above about a school’s value depending on the bloc within which it operates. I don’t think Texas and Texas A&M and Arkansas and Oklahoma would try to start a rival NCAA even if they were a big enough bloc, because Texas and Texas A&M don’t get along well enough to collaborate on something with that high of stakes, but I also don’t think they’re a big enough bloc. The NCAA sent this letter to signal to schools in other states—schools who’ve been lobbying Congress to set national laws establishing a level playing field—that it, the NCAA, will still enforce a level playing field. The letter signals both, “Hey Texas, you can’t do that,” as well as, “Hey Virginia, we’ve got your back.” It’s the latter part that’s likely the motivator.
Another question, though, and the one that’s going to be the most important, is how exactly the NCAA will enforce these rules. There’s a narrative that the NCAA is bad at enforcement, and I think that’s true in one way and false in another. In the sense of whether the enforcement is effective, oh God no, no, no, no, the NCAA is not good at enforcement at all. The NCAA’s enforcement hardly deters wrongdoing, cash was flowing before NIL was legalized, the system is messy and inconsistent and takes forever to bring cases to conclusion. In the sense, however, of whether the enforcement serves the NCAA’s ultimate purpose of continuing to exist? I’m starting to think that it works.
The NCAA’s approach to enforcement seems to be to swing a big stick and hardly ever hit anybody with it, and to be sure that when they do hit someone, they hit the right person. They can’t hit too many powerful players at once. They also can’t hit someone for whom other schools would feel sympathy. They want to enforce as little as possible (this is cost-effective, too, and the NCAA makes money but it doesn’t make as much as many think) while scaring schools as much as possible. Most penalties, then, are performative and puny, like those given to UNC after it was revealed that their “student athletes” were often taking fake classes. Every now and then, though, the NCAA comes down hard, banning Oklahoma State from an NCAA Tournament over little more than clerical errors and, in other cases, tossing around the words “death penalty.” Is this inconsistency intentional? I really don’t know. But I wonder if it is. Either way, the NCAA doesn’t make much more or much less money depending on whether it does a good or a bad job of enforcing its rules. The NCAA’s income is much more tied to whether all its schools are still under its umbrella so they can play in its cash cow of a basketball tournament. The NCAA, even more than most businesses, just wants to continue to exist. It’s running a bear race. As long as it doesn’t get eaten, it wins.
Other questions abound. How aggressively will schools push the envelope? If this makes it to federal court, which set of rules will win? Will this satiate those calling for better NCAA guidance or is the NCAA too toothless? We’ll address these in more depth later, but I would guess, in order: Very. State laws. No.
See you tomorrow.
