What’s the MLB’s Deal with Overspending on Players?
As we head into spring training baseball, fans are questioning the mindsets of MLB team owners. Overspending has become a common theme in Major League Baseball, so much that owners of competing teams have called out others for spending so much on their players. Most recently, Dick Monfort, owner of the Colorado Rockies, called out Peter Seidler, owner of the San Diego Padres.
“What the Padres are doing, I don’t 100% agree with, though I know our fans probably agree with it. We’ll see how it works out,” Montfort said, according to the Denver Post’s Patrick Saunders. “That puts a lot of pressure [on us], but it’s not just the Padres. It’s the Mets, it's the Phillies. This has been an interesting year.”
The Padres are projected to have the third-highest payroll in the MLB at $251 million, with the Yankees ($272 million) and the Mets ($361 million) ahead of them. This upward trend of aggressive spending has been common in the league in the past few years. The average salary for an MLB player for the 2022 season was $4.41 million.
The Mets’ recent signing of Max Scherzer put the veteran starting pitcher at the top of the MLB salary rankings, as he has a contract worth over $43,000,00. It seems as if almost every year, general managers and team front offices are trying to top their previous spending from the season prior–an issue that causes teams to have a very high luxury tax.
This is such a common occurrence that fans are almost numb to these transactions–they aren’t fazed by these large paychecks being given to players. The MLB is currently the fourth-highest-paying sport in the world. Players are handed lengthy contracts and most times where players don’t end up staying with the contract full-term. Overall, these high-paying contracts don’t work out, either due to injury or just the fact that a player is getting older and they no longer produce numbers like they used to.
MLB owners need to begin to think twice about the transactions they’re going through with–or else their teams are going to start paying the price, literally.