“Hal Steinbrenner is a barely committed-to-win competitor within MLB’s billionaire ownership gene pool. When it comes to spending revenues on payrolls, the Yankees fall into the middle of the pact, percentagewise, below such renowned cheapskates as KC and Baltimore”
40 comments
Disgrace of a franchise. Sell the team.
Im really curious which hedgefund or investment banker Yankees’ fans think Hal could sell to who would spend *more* money than Hal is already spending
The only defense I can say is that unlike other owners, Hal’s business is the Yankees. Mets, Dodgers ect… have owners who are rich from other ventures. Meaning while the Yankees make the most money, Hal is not the richest owner by himself. That still doesn’t mean he should cheap out and cut payroll every couple years but can understand why he runs the team responsibly.
Yankees are major source of income for Steinbrenner family. It’s not a toy like it is for Dodgers and Mets owners.
This is such a stupid narrative.
Per usual nuance context doesn’t to be a thing. That’s just revenue vs team payroll. Doesn’t include all the other expenses that go into running the team. And like others have mentioned, this is Hal’s main business vs other teams that have owners that see this as a side business / hobby and not their primary source of income.
Episode 3,432 of “Asset value ≠ Free Cash”
The Steinbrenners are a lot of things, but they’re not cash-rich hedge fund owners like Cohen and whatever Hydra consortium own the dodgers.
That’s not what “gene pool” means, and that’s also not what “pact” means
Folks may not want to hear it and downvote me for it, but when your over the third luxury tax threshold, spending is **highly** penalized. Its much more the way the owners set up the system and much less the Yankees being cheap. The Dodgers and the Mets are outliers, breaking records in recent years. Most teams are never going to do that sort of thing.
3rd highest payroll in baseball, nobody traded for more money then when they got Stanton, gave judge 300 million, made Cole the highest paid pitcher at the time, max fried highest paid lefty in baseball history, Rodon inside the top 5 as well. It’s not a money problem it’s a player development problem from the Yankees. The Dodgers spend and develop, the Yankees do 50% of it.
More seriously, I’d like Hal to spend more- I think “the Yankees don’t spend like they used to” is a much better explanation for their issues the last decade than anything relating to Boone or Cashman- but it’s silly to act like 11th out of 30 is notably bad. It is, as the math wizards in the sub will note, slightly above-average. And the gap between the Yankees and the 8th-place Angels is only a couple percentage points.
There’s six or seven teams in the league that really spend aggressively, and most of them are probably in the boom phase of a boom-bust cycle. I’d be pretty surprised if Toronto, Philly, or Arizona are still spending 2/3 of their revenue on payroll five years from now. And that’s not even getting into whatever the Mets are doing.
MLB is a disgrace
You have a team spending $550 million on their team and the next closest is not even 75% of that at $400 million?
And another team spending $111 million? Literally 20% of the top team?
MLB needs to create a hard cap and floor what a joke.
Also could Hal do better? Sure. But KC and Baltimore are not cheapskates if they’re top 10 in spending revenue on payroll. 11th is still better than half the league.
The bigger issue is how much of an absolute joke the MLB salary situation has become.
The Ohtani deferral is also a fucking joke.
Do we have a running record of how much money that Yankees have had confiscated for redistribution to less popular or successful franchises? I think any economic analysis that ignores that is misguided.
People calling out that the Mets (90%) and the Dodgers (73%) ownership groups have other sources of income are missing the point: George Steinbrenner ran profitable payrolls around 60% of revenue as opposed to Hal’s 50%.
If Hal merely spent like his father did, we’d have a payroll of $437mn per year. And we’d still be spending less than the Padres (64%), Diamondbacks (67%), Phillies (67%), and Blue Jays (72%) on a percentage basis.
The issue with the team isn’t what Hal spends, it’s how Hal spends it
This thread is full of shilling for billionaires. Pathetic
I don’t really like Hal but I don’t really get the idea he’s not spending lol. A lot of the guys we want to spend on are going to the Dodgers anyways.
If Yamamoto wants to go to LA, there isn’t another Yamamoto spawned on the market for the Yankees to sign that Hal just isn’t signing off on.
Does everyone here think the Yankees are scraping by profit year after year ?
This isn’t as nuanced as it seems. There are a lot of other things the Yankees do very well that aren’t reflected in the payroll.
Now that being said, I do believe winning a title at all costs isn’t Hal’s priority, and if that’s the case he should just sell the team. He’d easily make 10-12 billion and can open the hedge fund he seemingly wants to run.
Yankees fans hate to hear this, but an owner who spends $300 million on payroll and shuts the fuck up is basically the ideal scenario. We’re never going to have it better than Hal Steinbrenner.
I’ve got my issues with Cashman but I’d rather he have unilateral control of baseball operations than have him running every decision by some idiot nepo baby (aka the Jets/Knicks model.)
if you don’t know the difference between revenue and profit, give this post an upvote
Isn’t it “middle of the pack”?
Hal is running the team like a business because he doesn’t have the pockets of a. legitimate billionaire owner. The Yankees also chose to dilute their ownership by like 30 percent as well. I’ve said for years Hal should sell the team. Get a nice fat check out of it and sell it too an ownership group who has fuck you money and doesn’t mind spending money and recouping years later.
I feel like 50% of team revenue on payroll is probably a pretty fair target? Given all the other costs of running a team. Which puts us just a little shy of the line. I would love to see us spend Dodgers caliber money, obviously, and just stack the lineup, but it’s not happening.
We also have some guys who are only paid as low as they are because of where they’re at in the arb years. Jazz made $5mil but he’s definitely not a $5mil player, for instance. Which is undoubtedly true across all teams to different degrees but it definitely can skew how spending looks. And also means maybe not breaking the bank on short fill-in contracts when like 2/3 of our current team pillars are going to be commanding much larger contracts in the coming years.
To anyone apologizing for this chart and pointing out that Hal/Steinbrenners primary business is the Yankees:
Why should we care?
The Yankees payroll adjusted for inflation hasn’t really changed since 2000 but the overall landscape of baseball payrolls has changed dramatically with ownership groups like the Dodgers and Cohen/Mets. If the Steinbrenner family needs to diversify their portfolio outside of baseball, maybe they should.
Does that mean they sell the team to do so? I have no idea but I’m also not interested in apologizing for insanely rich owners who are being outspent by almost $200M+ by their contemporaries.
Idk if it’s just me, but this guy spends a lot. Maybe not as much as the dodgers, but he’s spending. It’s not like before where he was not spending on anybody good. Fried, rodon, judge, Cole, all these players have big contracts. The spending isn’t the issue here. The issue is that they have grown to be okay with losing, they’re seen more of as business with a rich and storied history and the team is controlled 100% by analytics. The roster construction is terrible in which the offense is inconsistent and the defense is not good. They’re so into their heads that they mess up on fundamentals and when they’re asked about it, they just act like it’s okay, they’re the New York Yankees, they can overcome anything, and there’s always another game. Little league loser mentality
The team today was not how it was back then and obviously it’s because the times have changed. But they have changed for the worse, not better
They’ve spent more than enough to build a winning team, they just haven’t allocated the funds well enough to build that winning team
it doesnt matter how much he spends – we keep going over this.
the problem isn’t the amount, it’s who is spending it and what they spend it on i.e. Cashgod the Great.
Spending isn’t the Yankees problem. Payroll allocation and player development have been the issue.
Yankees are a business and business is booming, as long as they print money they have no reason to go all out. I’m not saying they are cheap or don’t want to win but winning is definitely secondary to the bottom line.
If and when sports fans finally ever come to accept the fact that sports is just a business for these owners, then they’ll see things a lot clearer. You may live and die with your chosen team, but the owner lives and dies about that profit margin
these posts that just assume front line payroll + tax expense can scale perfectly with gross revenue, as if there are no other costs associated with running a major league baseball team
i’ll bet real money the yankees are spending more in other areas than the friggen diamondbacks are
maybe the yankees can spend more…maybe they can’t. still, this metric could very well just be ass.
edit: also anyone who tries to seriously say if they were Hal they’d sell the team, just …no you wouldn’t.. Owning the New York Yankees puts you in a 1 of 1 club. not a single person here would ever sell the team if they owned it.
So based on the logic presented here, all 19 teams below the Yankees on this list also have no interest in winning, while the 10 teams above them are the only teams that do?
Ridiculous.
We’ve known that since he took over full time after his brother died all Hall cares about is his piggy bank that’s it
It’s been clear for years that the Yankees have a formula to maximize profits and minimize spending, and it’s worked for almost two decades.
The Yankees know they aren’t spending to put together World Series teams, they’re spending to remain consistently competitive all season long at the cheapest price point possible. So they get maximum returns from the fans and sell out every home season game, but don’t have to make the extra financial investments that World Series-caliber teams require.
I question the toronto number. Its really hard to parse revenue when we are owned by the company that gives us the tv deal.
Cashman committed nearly half-a-billion in salary in the 2014 offseason and still missed the playoffs and didn’t win 90 games until the 2017 season. No amount of spending is gonna make sure it gets allocated properly if the guy in charge of putting the roster together is incompetent.
How has this garbage ass fan blog not been banned yet? Utter fucking slop posted there 24/7. Can’t even get the phrase “middle of the pack” correct.
And the Cubs’ ownership has the 3rd largest market and is a bottom 5 payroll to revenue. You should be thankful. A 350 million dollar payroll isn’t enough for the Yankees?
He’s such a fail son disgrace. The worst of the worst of the nepo babies. The only thing he shares with Old Man Steinbrenner is a last name.
Yankees fans are soft pushovers to continue allowing this loser to run the ship. It makes me sad and ashamed.
Same with Cashman.