A Reckoning, Someday

Today, Trib columnist Paul Sullivan put the Mets’ payroll at $349 million, plus a luxury tax of $70 million. This led me to wonder, what would (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich) Hegel think or do? Why, he’d employ the Hegelian dialectic, which holds that thesis meeting antithesis leads to synthesis. Put another way, the Mets spend all that money, something’s got to give in the world of baseball. All those owners who will not or cannot spend like the Mets’ Steve Cohen are going to react. There will be a new normal in baseball. Only it won’t be as simple as A+B=C. Better to expect the unexpected. Cohen is placing a $400-million-plus bet that he can win a World Series or two or three. His spending on free agents drives up the price tag on other free agents. In some indirect way I can grasp, kind of, what Justin Verlander and Trea Turner pull down will affect arbitration awards for younger players. Again, the price of stadium hot dogs will go up. But for how long and how much? And what if the economy tanks? A new version of Jerry Reinsdorf, very hawkish when it comes to players, buys a team and rallies the owners or takes over from Rob Manfred? Some or all of these factors will change the economic landscape of the national pastime. As long as I can listen to games on the radio for free, that’s fine by me. Baseball will keep going. In exactly what form is a question I don’t have an answer for. I do know, though, it will all be very Hegelian.