Tag: luxury tax threshold

Notes: Twins ownership, Padres payroll

The Twins lost out on new owners who might end up owning division rivals instead, while the Padres are… well, uh. What are they doing?

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Remember back six or so weeks ago, when the Twins were expecting that they’d have new owners in place by Opening Day? Those plans might have changed, as the potential owner the current ones, the Pohlads, had been interacting with instead pulled out of the running. The reason? To increase their investment as minority owners in the White Sox.

Billionaire brothers Justin and Mat Ishbia were apparently the only ones that the Twins had engaged with to the point of their already being vetted by both the team and MLB, but they ended up choosing the White Sox, instead. This makes a couple of things clear: the Ishbias were considering buying the Twins because they were available, but apparently didn’t have a strong attachment to that franchise, specifically. A larger investment in the White Sox coming now tells us that the pair likely sees themselves as the future owners of that franchise: Jerry Reinsdorf is 88 years old, you know, and while he’s pure evil, it’s not like he’s immortal or anything. Probably.

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Red Sox explain ‘no, not like that’ in response to broken ‘full-throttle’ promise

The Red Sox said one thing and did another. Can you believe it?

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Back on November 2, when the Red Sox introduced their new executive — chief baseball officer Craig Breslow — at a press conference, one of the Fenway Sports Group owners, Tom Werner, made a comment that suggested things were going to change in Boston:

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The state of the Padres’ financials is still unclear (for now)

The Padres are trying to get under the luxury tax, but reportedly aren’t saying they have to be there: 2024 might end up clearing up quite a bit of what we don’t know yet.

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The Padres have been, and still are, cutting payroll. It’s a bit of a cause for alarm, when paired with the news that they took out a $50 million loan back in September — and wanted an even larger one than that — but there are also reasons to believe that maybe this isn’t such a big deal after all. What we really need at this point is some clarity, and we maybe got a little bit of it over the weekend. Emphasis on maybe.

Per a report from The Athletic’s Dennis Lin, the Padres would “prefer” to get their payroll under $200 million in 2024, which would allow them to reset their luxury tax state, avoid penalties, and keep from stacking up further ones with repeated threshold crossings. However, “prefer” is not the same as “will,” and the team is apparently leaving open the possibility of crossing the threshold again, anyway:

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No one is ‘circumventing’ the luxury tax threshold

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Thanks to a rumor about the Padres considering a 14-year, $400 million contract to then-free agent Aaron Judge, there have been some rumblings about how Major League Baseball would have reacted to such a deal. Jon Heyman reported at the New York Post that, “sources say they would not have been allowed, as MLB would have seen the additional years as only an attempt to lower their official payroll to lessen the tax.” That’s just one side of any conversation on this, though: MLB might have tried to get rid of it, and are within their rights to given that circumventing the threshold goes against the collective bargaining agreement, but what are the chances that the Players Association would have allowed them to do so, and what are the chances MLB would have successfully erased the deal when challenged on it?

My guess is “not good,” and Ken Rosenthal’s own reporting echoes that:

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