For years, the Mets were determined to win while staying underneath the luxury tax threshold. Now, in the fourth year of Steve Cohen’s ownership, the Mets show no signs of getting under it.
Once again, the Mets are opening the season with the highest payroll in baseball at just over $307 million. It will increase when J.D. Martinez is ready in the coming weeks, though not by an exponential amount since the slugger’s one-year, $12 million contract includes heavy deferrals. And despite the 110% tax rate the Mets are facing this season, the possibility of another addition remains.
“We know everything is 110 cents on the dollar, so obviously, that’s an expensive decision,” Cohen said Friday morning at Citi Field before Opening Day. “But I am competitive. So if the right thing comes along at the right moment, we’ll explore.”
The Mets enter this season without the same target on their back they did in previous years. Every player in the clubhouse will tell you that the expectation is to win. Still, there is a far different feel compared to previous years of the Cohen regime when they out-spent everyone in the winter and trotted out a star-laden squad on Opening Day. They’re still out-spending everyone else, but they’re now paying some of those stars to play for other teams.
There is a purpose to that and one that Cohen has highlighted often, and that’s to help build a formidable farm system that consistently churns out Major League-ready talent.
In year No. 4 of the Cohen era, the Mets don’t quite have that yet, but the owner does see progress, especially after last year’s trade deadline and the opening of the club’s high-tech pitching lab in Port St. Lucie.
“We’ve got 8-10 [starting pitching] prospects now who will hopefully develop into major leaguers,” he said. “I look at it as a numbers game. If we just have enough of them, some are going to work out. Can’t tell you who. And on top of that, these pitchers are learning new pitches or pitch shapes, their biomechanics are improving from the work that’s been done in our lab. So these are all like small improvements that you can’t measure today, but over time, I suspect we’ll see improvement in performance.”
Cohen stays in touch with Mets staff to get reports on everyone from the top prospects to the bench players. He made several appearances at spring training to take in games and workouts, as well as to talk to fans. The reports on rising minor-league pitchers like Christian Scott, Mike Vasil, Dominic Hamel and reliever Nate Lavender have been largely positive, but it’s still too early to tell if they will be able to contribute at the big-league level.
The idea of having a $0 luxury tax bill seems “foreign” to the hedge fund billionaire.
“It just seems like that can be hard to do,” he said.
Until it becomes easier, Cohen will keep spending. The Mets are keeping some flexibility in the payroll to be able to maneuver throughout the season. It’s a different kind of “payroll flexibility” than in the past, but Cohen wants fans and players alike to see that that he is doing exactly what he says he will. That they can take him at his word.
“I’m perfectly happy to finance this in a way where that isn’t a goal of mine,” Cohen said. “Would it be? Would it be if it were to happen? That’d be fantastic. But I mean, the reality is, you’ve got to expect something in the middle someplace, right? Spending $375 million last year was over the top.”
Cohen landed a president of baseball operations in David Stearns who is known for doing more with less. Stearns brought in his own people to identify talent with their own ideas of how to utilize talent. The former Milwaukee Brewers baseball ops boss constructed a roster for the 2024 season that he believes is deep enough to get to the postseason. The goal is to add depth beyond just the 26-man roster, extending it to Triple-A and even Double-A.
A New York City native, Cohen and Stearns have zeroed in on players with experience playing in New York (former Yankees Luis Severino and Harrison Bader) and a manager who has coached in this market for more than a decade (former Yankees bench coach Carlos Mendoza). He has confidence that Mendoza and Stearns will be in their positions for more than just a few years, eliminating the rotating door of executives, managers and coaches and the differing philosophies and systems that came and went with them.
The goal remains the same: Build a perennial World Series winner. If baseball’s richest owner has to spend more money to do so, he’ll do it.
“I’m not afraid to spend money but I don’t want to be just spending money for the sake of spending money,” Cohen said. “I want this organization to run efficiently and professionally. I really have said this for a while, but I truly believe that the only way to get there is sustainability is developing talent.”
