Do not expect the New York Yankees to correspond to the Los Angeles Dodgers to spend anytime soon, to judge by their owner’s recent comments.
The president of the Yankees, Hal Steinbrenner, responded to the series of recent dodgers, who pushed them to a wage bill planned in 2025 of $ 375 millionIn an interview with Meredith Marakovits from Yes Network. His answer was something that you would expect to hear a small market team, rather than the baseball Titan of the last century.
Steinbrenner’s comments, Via Yes Network::
Q: “You look at the dodgers, they simply continue to spend money. Their salary approaching almost $ 400 million. What is your mind when you see them continuing to make these big signatures?
A: “It is difficult for most of us that the owners can do the kind of thing they do. We will see if it is paying. They must always have a relatively without injury season to work for them , and it’s a long season, as you know, and once you are in the playoffs, everything can happen.
Before entering the financial dynamics in play here, it should be noted that playing the card “We will see what is happening in playoffs and if they remain healthy” on a team about three months after they you have decisively defeated in the World Series thanks to a defensive fusionWith three healthy departure launchers, is a Steinbrenner capital-C choice.
The Dodgers were the unspecified player of the current offseason, to the point that their expenses inspired calls to a salary ceiling so that the owners of less lucrative teams do not have to deal with the pressure to spend on a similar degree.
The team signed free agents Blake Snell, Teoscar Hernández, Michael Comforto, Tanner Scott, Blake Treinen, Hyeseong Kim and Kirby Yates to contracts totaling $ 384.5 million, largely in delayed money. He also caught Roki Sasaki, a forbidden player to sign a major league contract and left to choose the team that suits him best. He selected the dodgers because, well, why wouldn’t you do it?
Add this to pre-existing mega-contracts like that of Shohei Ohtani ($ 700 million), Mookie Betts ($ 365 million) and Yoshinobu Yamamoto ($ 325 million), and the team is now on the right way for a payroll CBT of $ 388.6 million of $ 388.6 million). In cot contractsWhich would be the highest in the history of the MLB.
For their part, the Yankees are on the right track for the third in this number at $ 302.9 million, down from $ 316.2 million from last year. When taking CBT supplements into account, the pay gap between the Dodgers and the Yankees would summarize more than nine figures.
What are the Yankees when they manage by dodgers and dishes?
Beyond the expenditure of the Dodgers, the biggest moment of the off-season was the New York dishes which signed Juan Soto for A monster offer of $ 765 million. None of these stories are excellent for the Yankees, who responded with agreements for players such as Max Fried, Paul Goldschmidt, Cody Bellinger and Devin Williams.
Admittedly, the dishes still have a long way to go before matching the dodgers in anything, but the two teams seem perfectly ready to overcome the Yankees in the predictable future.
For the food, it’s quite simple. The billionaire of hedge funds Steve Cohen owns the team and has spent three quarters of a billion dollars to demonstrate that he will escape the Yankees on whatever he wants. The Steinbrennaers have led the Yankees as a huge family business while the dishes are an expensive hobby for Cohen, who is ready to increase a huge deficit because he has much more money in his life.
The Dodgers, on the other hand, have Shohei Ohtani.
You have probably seen a lot of people describe the cord of 6.5 million sasaki dollars as the most scandalous negotiation in baseball this decade, but the $ 700 million agreement of Ohtani more than gives it a race for his money. Dodgers could assert a player of it, say, $ 200 million for peanuts in Sasaki, but they could legitimately have a player who is worth a billion dollars in brand performance and recognition at the cost of around $ 460 million when adjusting inflation.
Dodgers do not receive a lot of money from Jersey Ohtani sales or streaming games in Japan (these two income is distributed evenly through the MLB), but it has In fact an advertising power in his country of origin and in the world. The dishes could have Soto, the Yankees could have an Aaron judge, but Ohtani is at a different level with regard to the commercial side of baseball. There is only one international superstar in baseball, and the dodgers have it for the next nine years.
However, even if the Yankees act as the financial advantage they have appreciated for decades have evaporated, let us maintain a certain perspective. By Sporto calculationsThe Yankees carried out $ 720 million in revenues in 2023, most of them in MLB (the Dodgers finished second with $ 637 million).
We will see how the 2024 figures shake in a few months – the Dodgers could have advanced them very well – but the fact is that the money should be there if the Yankees want to do what the dodgers and puts do. The Steinbrennaers just have the shortest weapons at the table of rich children.
By Travis Sawchik calculations of the scoreThe dodgers previously passed a much greater proportion of their income from players than the Yankees (while the dishes threw money to a financially psychotic degree). The problem is that dodgers could earn as much money as yankees now, if not more. And that says nothing about a robust players’ development pipeline that is the desire for MLB.
You can manage your team as a simple company or treat it as if it was more than a business, as for many fans. You just can’t do the first while claiming the second, and this is where resentment comes from many owners.
Hal Steinbrenner is right on something, at least
The area where Steinbrenner is not wrong is that anything can happen in the playoffs.
Dodgers are the favorites to win the World Series 2025, but they are not rating favorites like the Golden State Warriors when they brought Kevin Durant. This is not how baseball works.
BETMGM currently has the Dodgers at +250 dimensions to win the fall classic this year, well in advance on the Yankees from second place to +800. However, +250 ratings correspond to an implicit probability of 28.6%. Thus, the ratings act as if there were almost three quarters of luck that something is deadly badly for dodgers by November.
If this happens – if the problems of injury of the dodgers prove to be insurmountable, or if their bats are becoming cold or if they face the bad team at the wrong time – the sport may not seem as unfair as Salary owners, hooded owners, wish.
