A Merry Mets Christmas
By 
In the spirit of the season, let us see what hedge fund crook Steve Cohen has been up to with his latest play thing.
(1) With the signing of Carlos Correa — which is a bit up in the air at the moment because of his balky knee — the Mets’s player payroll for 2023 is slated to be $382 million, which will trigger a roughly $110 million luxury tax, meaning the team’s effective payroll will be nearly half a billion dollars. (MLB has a soft salary cap in the form of a luxury tax, which when triggered is redistributed in a roughly even split between the Players Association and the team owners who don’t go over the cap).
(2) The luxury tax figure by itself is larger than the entire projected 2023 payrolls of the Orioles, Marlins, Royals, Reds, Pirates, Athletics, and Diamondbacks, which seems like a problem for any kind of genuine competitive balance.
(3) Major league player salaries were actually down 18% in real terms between 2017 and 2022, while MLB total revenues were down by about 10%, again inflation-adjusted. MLB salaries were about 45% of revenues last year, which is slightly less than the comparable figures for the NFL and the NBA, probably, although there’s lots of creative accounting in this area so it’s hard to say exactly.
(4) This year marks the 50th anniversary of Flood v. Kuhn, a particularly ridiculous Supreme Court opinion which held that federal antitrust laws should continue not to be applicable to major league baseball, because major league baseball needed special economic protections to flourish. Average major league salary in the season Curt Flood filed his lawsuit: $24,900 (this is $203,000 in 2022 dollars). Average major league salary last season: $4.41 million — again this was down nearly 20% over the previous five years in real terms.
(5) When I posted about Aaron Judge’s new contract a few weeks ago, some commenters were under the mistaken impression that I had some sort of problem with the gargantuan salaries that superstars like Judge make. Like any good Radical Left Marxist, I would much prefer that as large a share as possible of MLB’s current $11 billion annual revenue stream go to the Working Class rather than the Capitalists. My doubts about the Judge contract were purely from the perspective of fans of the teams vying for Judge’s services, who might well wonder whether signing Judge was an efficient use of a team’s overall payroll.
(6) Speaking of salaries, the Mets’s functional $492 million projected payroll represents 2.8% of hedge fund crook Steve Cohen’s current total net worth, so he’ll probably be OK one way or another.