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Steve Cohen is a man outside of MLB. He views his team as a fan, not a businessman. Other franchises may penny-pinch, cry poor, or slice on the margins in a twisted strategic game dressed as analytical wisdom yet ultimately rooted in the almighty bottom line. Cohen is a different beast. He will stop at nothing to acquire the best talent the Lord placed on this Earth. “If it’s a few percent more, what’s the difference?” said the man who had just pledged to pay a guy over $300 million. He probably puffed a cigar while saying it.
The natural reaction is one of disgust; the man just broke the sport, after all. Once the George Steinbrenner spending of the 90s and 00s gave way to the few remaining albatrosses left in MLB—enjoy retirement, Albert Pujols—teams finally saw through the free-agent haze, seeing it as fools gold. Contracts became wiser. It took four months for people to realize signing Manny Machado was a good move. An occasional Stephen Strasburg or Anthony Rendon wave will rock the boat, but its aim is true; smart teams are too savvy to crash.
A man bombarding in, guns blazing, to sign a historic amount of elite free agents in reaction to losing to the Padres in the NLDS sets off alarms. This isn’t how teams are supposed to act.
As we all know so well, franchises are supposed to Know Their Role, sign Their Guys—an appropriate amount of them—then play each other under a gentlemanly façade that this is The Best They Can Do. The Yankees stopped making the A’s their development team because it became uncouth in the public eye. That hurts business. People must somehow believe in a fair baseball league.
The state approving one’s ability to drive coincides with the precise moment a rational being realizes that baseball is dementedly unfair, but the game’s beauty has tranced us all; we’re content with rationalizing the immense inequality as long as the product supplies its thrills.
Cohen’s ultimate sin is that he would rather play a different game: if spending rules exist solely as tax, then why would you do anything other than spend as much money as you have? Who cares about spending $30 million a year when it takes 33 such contracts to hit $1 billion—a scratch against any owner’s vast wealth?
Are his actions good for baseball? In the immediate future, no. Cohen’s Mets will win a thousand games in 2023 and—with permission from the baseball gods—bulldoze other powerhouses with such ease that it’ll be a joke to tell across generations. The Dodgers are speed bumps when Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander are your 1-2 punch, and your lineup has Mark Canha hitting 8th. Not even one of those good speed bumps either; they’re that worn-down crumble someone installed in a school parking lot 40 years ago that hasn’t received a fix since all funding goes to a new scoreboard for a perpetual 3-9 football team.
But Cohen could be in for a long-term play; while he sees his actions as buying great players to add to his human trading card deck, he’s also applying pressure to other owners. This is the age of social media. Teams are more visible than ever. Any average dolt can hurl insults directly at a franchise’s social media account, bringing them closer to the people’s will than in the medieval times when talking with the king was impossible. Fans don’t have enough time to affect this off-season, but who knows what kind of weird pressure points they’ll press when a team lowballs a free agent in the age of a team possessing a nearly half-billion-dollar payroll.
Or teams may ignore the noise until their bottom-line falls. Franchises are funny like that.
This isn’t Cohen’s fault. Any of us poors would love to own our favorite team, churning through cartoon piles of money while our net worth remains iron-clad. The only thing Cohen broke was tradition; Baseball created spending rules based on inequality, added new ones for eye wash, then relied on their closed community of ownership to keep others in line so that the veneer remained intact. An outsider stomped on those rules; it’s up to baseball to react.
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