Welcome to Staten News — where the payrolls are huge, the standings are brutal, and the receipts are deferred until 2034.
Steve Cohen spent more than $350 million on the 2026 Mets and watched them finish last. The Dodgers spent more than $410 million and won 100 games. On paper those are the two biggest spenders in baseball.
On paper is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
💸 The number on the tax bill isn’t the number in the bank
Start with the thing everybody gets wrong. Baseball doesn’t have a salary cap. It has the Competitive Balance Tax, a luxury tax that kicks in at $244 million this year and climbs to a 110% rate for repeat offenders on every dollar past $304 million. You can spend as much as you want. You just pay a fine on the way out.
The Mets’ tax payroll sits around $356.5 million, per Spotrac, with an estimated tax bill near $99 million on top of it. Most of that money actually leaves the building this year. Juan Soto’s $765 million deal has no deferred money. He gets paid like a normal person, $51 million this season, in real dollars.
The Dodgers’ tax payroll is over $410 million. The cash they actually pay out in 2026 is somewhere around $250 million to $262 million, depending on which day you count.
Read that gap again. Roughly $150 million of “payroll” that isn’t leaving the account this year.
⏳ How the Dodgers turned 2034 into a payment plan
The trick is deferral, and the Dodgers didn’t invent it. They just industrialized it.
Shohei Ohtani makes $70 million a year. He takes home $2 million of it. The other $68 million gets paid out after the contract ends. MLB counts deferred money at its present-day value for tax purposes, so Ohtani’s $70 million counts as roughly $46 million on the CBT books.
Then they did it again. And again. Kyle Tucker signed for four years and $240 million this winter with $30 million deferred. Add up every contract on the roster and the Dodgers owe about $1.08 billion in deferred salary.
Translation: a dollar promised in 2035 costs less than a dollar paid today, and the Dodgers have made a habit of promising instead of paying. The tax counts that money at its discounted value. The cash stays invested in the meantime.
That’s not a loophole the league forgot to close. That’s the rule working exactly as written, by the one front office that read it closest.
📺 The owner sits on both sides of the TV deal
Here’s where it stops being a baseball story.
The Dodgers’ local TV money comes from Spectrum SportsNet LA, a 25-year, $8.35 billion deal that averages about $334 million a year. The network isn’t just a buyer. It’s a 50-50 venture between Charter and Guggenheim Partners, the firm run by Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter.
So when the Dodgers sell their TV rights, the owner is partly selling to himself.
Now look at how the team was bought. Guggenheim’s group paid $2.15 billion for the Dodgers in 2012, and more than $1.2 billion of that financing came from insurance companies Walter controls, according to a Los Angeles Times breakdown cited by Fortune in August. Those insurers later disclosed about $17 billion in related-party transactions, roughly 39% of their invested assets, and one of them agreed to swap $6.5 billion of related-party investments for independent assets.
The SEC and federal prosecutors are looking at whether those insurers lent money to businesses tied to Walter without properly disclosing the relationships. Nobody has been charged with anything, and a class action over Security Benefit’s Dodgers loans was later dismissed. The point here isn’t a verdict.
The point is the structure. One family of companies financed the team, co-owns the network that pays the team, and manages the insurance money that sits behind the debt. Money doesn’t leave that circle. It just changes which pocket it’s in.
🔁 Why the Mets can’t run the same play
Cohen is richer than almost anyone in sports. He still doesn’t have the plumbing.
When he bought the Mets for $2.42 billion in 2020, SNY wasn’t part of the deal. The Wilpon family’s Sterling Equities still controls about 65% of the network, with Charter and Comcast holding the rest. Cohen has wanted SNY for years and reportedly still does. As of the latest reporting, he doesn’t have it.
That means the Mets’ TV money is a check from someone else. The Dodgers’ TV money is a check from a company their owner half-owns.
Cohen’s model is simpler and, honestly, kind of admirable. He pays the players now, pays the tax now, and eats the bill. Bo Bichette got $126 million over three years. Devin Williams got $51 million. The Mets traded for Luis Robert Jr. and Freddy Peralta. All of it real money, all of it this year.
And the Mets went 74-88, finished 20 games behind Atlanta, and got eliminated on September 14. Last place in the NL East for the first time since 2003.
Spending isn’t the same as building. The Dodgers figured out how to spend in the future and win in the present.
🏆 Meanwhile, in Los Angeles
The Dodgers went 100-62, won their 13th NL West title in 14 years, and closed out the Braves in four games for a third straight trip to the NLCS. They’re chasing a third straight World Series after beating the Yankees in 2024 and outlasting Toronto in an 11-inning Game 7 last fall.
Every one of those deferred dollars is buying wins today and getting paid for when the roster looks completely different.
⚖️ The bill comes due in December
The current labor deal expires in December. MLB has already put a real salary cap on the table, $245.3 million with a $171.2 million floor starting in 2027, and the players’ union has called it a non-starter. Lockout talk is not hypothetical anymore.
A hard cap would hit the Mets and the Dodgers very differently. It would change how deferrals get counted, how media money gets split, and whether the structure in Los Angeles survives the next CBA at all.
This is the offseason that decides whether the Dodgers built a dynasty or just found the last open door before the league locked it.
— The Bandicoots ⚾💰