The Mets aim to buy a World Series title. The Braves may grow one

You know the old saying about correlation not implying causation? Well, sometimes the two are related. A look at the highest payrolls in MLB reveals that the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Mets lead the pack. The Dodgers and Mets also happen to have the best winning percentages in baseball.

That the Dodgers are on top of both these standings isn’t shocking: this is a team that won it all in 2020 and entered the year as favorites in the National League. The Mets, however, are used to being second in both spending and winning in their own city thanks to crosstown rivals, the Yankees.

However, that was before Steven Cohen became the richest owner in baseball by buying a majority share of the Mets away from the much-loathed Fred Wilpon for a whopping $2.4bn in 2020. Wilpon signed on as a minority owner in 1980, became the majority owner of the team in 2002 and then lost a good chunk of his fortune as part of the Bernie Madoff scheme in 2008. Since then, the Mets have won the NL East exactly once, in 2015, although they did manage to make it all the way to the World Series that go around.

Just having money to spend is no guarantee of success, of course. But owning a large-market team in a sport without a hard salary cap should be a huge advantage. The Mets would surely have had more success in recent times with an owner who hadn’t lost a fortune in one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history.

So, in comes Cohen, a lifelong Mets fan. He quickly made a splash by acquiring shortstop Francisco Lindor – who the team later handed a $341m extension. Unfortunately, money alone wasn’t enough to appease the Baseball Gods in 2021. Lindor floundered in his first year, the Mets missed the playoffs yet again and then had to watch