Goold: Stars gravitating to big spenders on the coasts becomes central question for MLB

JUPITER, Fla. — A baseball operations executive who helped engineer the tank-to-title Houston Astros, ran the little-engine-that-did Milwaukee Brewers, and now captains the superyacht Mets, David Stearns can offer a universal perspective on the forces tilting the standings.

He’s traded an All-Star to trim salary in the game’s smallest market.

He’s signed an All-Star to the richest salary ever in the biggest city.

It’s not astronomy that maps the stars in Major League Baseball.

It’s the economy.

“Yes, the preponderance of stars are likely going to gravitate toward the bigger markets because that is where most of the time the highest contract is,” Stearns told the Post-Dispatch this spring.

That’s obviously a good thing for the Mets, who continued collecting luxury talents by signing outfielder Juan Soto this past winter to a $765 million contract that is the largest in professional sports. Stearns was asked, given his time developing a division winner in Milwaukee, if that’s a good thing for the game.

“I think it would be good for the game if smaller and mid-markets had greater opportunity to keep homegrown stars,” said Stearns, the Mets’ president of baseball operations. “I do think that would be good for the game.”

Welcome to baseball’s next frontier — addressing the pull of stars to the coasts.

It’s what happens when executives like Stearns, who once got the biggest bang for their buck in a smaller market, now have the biggest bucks, too.

As clubs flock north from Florida and Arizona for the start of the regular season this week, a majority of the highest-priced players will continue to cluster around major markets. Both New York clubs bid on Soto before he left the Bronx to cash in a jackpot in Queens. The other five free agents to sign a deal worth $100 million or more all signed with clubs in divisions in the East or West, and ace Corbin Burnes’ $210 million deal with Arizona was the only one of the nine-figure deals outside of the top 12 in market size.

The largest free-agent deal in the past two years by a team in the AL or NL Central for a player new to the team is Sonny Gray’s three-year, $75 million deal with the Cardinals. That is both an illustration of the marketplace and an indictment on the region’s big-market team, the Cubs, who were unsuccessful in their nine-figure bid for Alex Bregman.

Prompted by the Los Angeles Dodgers’ galactic spending, which included a $1 billion offseason a year ago, MLB clubs have growing internal concerns about payroll disparity.

For a question-and-answer article that appeared in Sunday’s 2025 Cardinals Season Preview special section, the Post-Dispatch asked Cardinals’ president of baseball operations John Mozeliak if he has concerns markets the size of St. Louis will have a difficult time contending if current trends continue.

His initial answer was blunt, two words in length: “I do.”

Hired by the Brewers in 2015 and in charge of baseball operations there through 2022, Stearns made the deal and negotiated the extension with MVP Christian Yelich. He also had to trade elite closer Josh Hader and rewrite the roster routinely to meet budget. During an event this spring at Roger Dean Stadium, Stearns discussed if the large markets take a lean-mean-small-market-machine approach and add a big checkbook, can mid- or small-market teams compete?

“There is an inherent optionality you get from running a smaller market team,” he said. “Because every year you have a little bit of a blank canvas. You can evaluate where the industry is, you can evaluate where the team is, and you can evaluate what is out there for the team to go and get. In certain offseasons, you’ll be more active than others. In the bigger market, where you have the opportunity to commit to these higher dollar and longer terms contracts, a lot of that optionality goes out the window.”

Stearns is describing roster elasticity — suggesting how land-locked a large team can become with massive, long-term deals like the one he negotiated with Soto or the ones the Dodgers signed with Shohei Ohtani, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Mookie Betts, and seemingly a dozen others.

Such elasticity relies on roster churn.

And roster churn, by definition, means cycling through players based on where they are in arbitration eligibility, salary demands, and contract control.

“Absolutely,” Stearns said.

The Post-Dispatch pointed out that doing that to remain competitive would be a hard sell to fans who would not get to see a star player stick around — team couldn’t contend and commit.

“Roster churn is a challenging concept for fans to digest,” Stearns said. “I have found in my career when it leads to winning, they’re OK with that. At the end of the day, fans want to win. They want postseason baseball. But when it doesn’t lead to winning, you’re not winning and you don’t have an identifiable roster that fans have grown up with — that can lead to challenges.”

That is how star clusters form.

Players’ union leader Tony Clark fielded a question about stars pulling to the coasts and suggested there were other ways for teams to bid on top talents with more than just commas in front of the decimal.

“It could be different if teams couldn’t (spend). Teams aren’t,” he said. “And so you have an offseason where a number of players went to LA. You had a couple of players who went to New York. … This isn’t a new phenomenon. We’ve always had a team or teams where the sky was falling and the industry was going to collapse as a result of the players they signed. You can go back as far as you want to go. One part of it is financial. Another part of it is, if you treat players well, you as an organization are committed to putting the best team on the field and you’ll find players are very interested in going to those places.”

Concerns about big markets and big spenders are cyclical in baseball, but there is a significant difference in the modern game, and it’s not just the fully operational Death Star in Los Angeles. First, the Guggenheim Dodgers are not your father’s Steinbrenner Yankees. They’re global, they’re corporate, and they are a player development juggernaut.

Facing questions about the Dodgers’ spending, commissioner Rob Manfred told reporters this spring that they’ve “done everything possible, always within the rules that currently exist, to put the best possible team on the field, and I think that’s great for the game.”

The current CBA expires after 2026 and payroll disparity along with a salary cap and/or floor are certain to be divisive issues, any of which could lead to a work stoppage, and that comes as mid-America markets are seeing a nourishing revenue stream evaporate.

The second factor is the larger-market teams are spending larger sums at the same time that some of the fly-over clubs are dealing with a cratering broadcast model and seeing a reduction in revenue that several larger markets, including Dodgers and Yankees, are shielded against. The Dodgers reportedly receive $334 million annually in broadcast fees. Depending on spending through the year that could be larger than any other payroll but their own.

Seven of the 11 teams snared in Diamond Sports Group’s bankruptcy filings are in the AL or NL Central divisions. Most of the 11 are lower-half markets. That includes the Cardinals who had nearly $20 million lopped off their expected TV revenue this year.

In the 10 winters from 2011 into the 2020 season, 32 free agents agreed to deals worth at least $100 million. There have been 34 in the past five offseasons. Only four of them have been in either Central division, and two of those four were Carlos Correa signing, opting-out, and signing again with the Minnesota Twins. In between he had two more lucrative offers that could not be finalized due to his physical.

Those larger offers were from, ahem, the Mets and Giants.

This past winter, the two Central divisions signed zero $100 million free-agents, and the largest deals went to former Cardinals’ pitchers — Michael Wacha re-signed with Kansas City ($51 million) and Jack Flaherty re-signed in Detroit ($35 million). The percentage of megadeals for teams in MLB’s central geography went down from 21% from 2012-2020 to 11% in the five years since the pandemic.

“There are a number of different factors that go beyond the dollars,” Clark said, listing weather and location and family ties as three of them. “Teams that have the dollars that treat their players and their families well — yeah, guys tend to migrate to them.”

During a chat with media outside the Cardinals’ clubhouse this spring, Clark discussed the lack of spending by the Cardinals and other similar sized markets. He said in the most recent round of collective bargaining the union proposed mechanisms that would reward mid- and small-market clubs who spent to contend and finished with winning records. The reward? Draft picks.

The concern about such a model is that it creates the same fallout that Stearns’ roster-churn example does without Stearns’ suggestion for a mechanism to help teams maintain their homegrown stars. The small- or mid-market teams build around players while their under control and development, and then, after they become stars and reach free agency, they launch to the larger deals and larger markets. The smaller teams become a feeder system for the larger teams, and the standings begin to shift in that same direction.

That limits the stars certain markets can see at night.

And it doesn’t take astrology to read what that means for the game’s future.

“Money is an advantage in this game. There is no question,” Stearns asserted. “With that said, it is only an advantage if we spend it wisely. … The smaller or mid-market teams don’t have the opportunity to make the types of mistakes that we can make.”

Some would probably like a greater chance to try.