“How much a dollar really cost? The question is detrimental, paralyzin’ my thoughts” Kendrick Lamar once rapped. To Mets owner Steve Cohen, not much.
The overnight news that the Mets are making ANOTHER signing, swiping Carlos Correa from the Giants after he had previously agreed with San Francisco.
Enter, MLB’s richest owner, Steve Cohen. He’s also baseball’s newest owner, buying the team from the Wilpons for $2.4 billion at the end of 2020. Cohen has committed more than $800 million to free agents this winter.
Baseball famously has no salary cap, but a “competitive balance tax,” meaning there are tiers of total payroll that determine how much of your payroll is penalized. There’s even a literal “Steve Cohen tax” at the highest mark – it was added last winter in fear this could happen.
Well it did, and Cohen doesn’t care. He’s blown past the highest tier by $150 million dollars. And with the tax structure, the Mets are projected to pay $111 million in the tax this year … the Brewers projected payroll is $130 million. Cohen is playing with fire, but why does he care? His net worth is $15 billion.
He told the New York Times in 2021 “listen, $290 million is a lot of money to spend overall and I’m OK with it, I don’t feel like it’s so confining that I can’t live with it.”
