Mets, Dodgers, Yankees Among Record-Tying 6 Teams to Pay Luxury Tax for 2022 Season

A record-tying six teams will pay the Major League Baseball luxury tax for the 2022 campaign.

Ronald Blum of the Associated Press reported the New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies, Boston Red Sox and San Diego Padres are all in line to pay the penalty for their payrolls, tying the mark of six teams set in 2016.

The Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, San Francisco Giants, Chicago Cubs and Detroit Tigers all paid the penalty that year.

Blum noted the Mets entered the season's final month with a payroll of $273.9 million, putting them on track to have the league's highest payroll for the first time since the 1989 campaign.

The Dodgers entered the year with the highest payroll, but that changed when pitcher Trevor Bauer was suspended for two years without pay in April. The league determined Bauer violated its domestic violence policy, and he is challenging the suspension before an arbitrator. He saw his 2022 salary drop from $32 million to the $3.8 million he was owed at the time of the suspension.

This year has continued a pattern for New York ever since Steven Cohen purchased the team following the 2020 campaign.

New York's payroll was $146 million in 2019, $199 million last year and is now the highest total in the league.

The result is a 93-55 team that sits one game ahead of the Atlanta Braves in the National League East standings. Fortunately for both the Mets and the Braves, whichever team loses out on the division crown has quite the cushion in the wild-card race and will surely be in the playoffs as well.

Atlanta is the top wild card in the National League and a full 11 games ahead of the Padres for that spot.

Whether the Mets can parlay their payroll into their first World Series crown since the 1986 season remains one of the biggest questions in baseball as the playoffs approach. The one-two combination of Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer atop the postseason rotation means New York could control any series it is in simply by winning the games with its two aces on the hill.

Doing that throughout October and eventually lifting the World Series trophy would surely make the luxury tax penalty worth it.