{"id":306689,"date":"2025-11-25T01:05:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T01:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/306689\/"},"modified":"2025-11-25T01:05:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T01:05:13","slug":"hal-steinbrenner-details-yankees-free-agency-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/306689\/","title":{"rendered":"Hal Steinbrenner details Yankees’ free agency thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hal Steinbrenner is not naming the price of his 2026 payroll.<\/p>\n

But the Yankees owner insists he is not set on lowering the number from the $319 million at which his club finished this year, another season gone by without winning a World Series.<\/p>\n

\u201cWould it be ideal if I went down [with the payroll]? Of course,\u201d Steinbrenner said on a Zoom call Monday. \u201cBut does that mean that\u2019s going to happen? Of course not. We want to field a team we believe could win a championship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steinbrenner has said in the past that a payroll of $300-plus million was \u201cunsustainable\u201d and that it shouldn\u2019t take a $300 million payroll to win a championship. Of course, he used to say the same thing about a $220 million payroll.<\/p>\n

But in the early stages of the offseason, as general manager Brian Cashman tries to build a roster that can finally capture the first Yankees title since 2009, they are already at roughly $278 million (for luxury tax purposes) for their 2026 payroll, per Cot\u2019s Contracts. And if they are able to re-sign Cody Bellinger, which is their top priority<\/a>, that number would vault to over $300 million without further changes to the roster.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can talk before [Cashman] goes into the winter meetings about a range, but because it\u2019s a fluid situation, that range can go bye-bye in two seconds if there\u2019s a deal that arises that I feel would be very beneficial to some area of need that we have,\u201d Steinbrenner said in his first comments since February. \u201cSo it\u2019s hard to give you a number, that\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to say. It\u2019s a different deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"NewNew York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner leaves the MLB owner\u2019s meeting earlier this month. Corey Sipkin for the NY POST<\/p>\n

Steinbrenner also disputed the suggestion that the Yankees made a profit this year despite reportedly raking in more than $700 million in revenues. He declined to get into specifics about the franchise\u2019s finances, but said it was \u201cnot fair\u201d to assume the Yankees came out in the black.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone wants to talk about revenues, they need to talk about our expenses, including $100 million to the city of New York we have to pay every February 1 [for Yankee Stadium], including the COVID year,\u201d Steinbrenner said. \u201cIt all starts to add up in a hurry. Nobody spends more money, I don\u2019t believe, on player development, scouting, performance science.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CodyRe-signing Cody Bellinger is a top priority for the Yankees. Ray Stubblebine\/UPI\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGo beyond the box score with the Bombers\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSign up for Inside the Yankees by Greg Joyce, exclusively on Sports+.\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tThank you\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The problem, though, is that the money Steinbrenner and his family have poured into the franchise has not resulted in a championship over the past 16 years. And now the Dodgers, whose payroll has surged past the rest of baseball, have won back-to-back World Series titles<\/a> and three in the past six years.<\/p>\n

Steinbrenner acknowledged that \u201cof course it\u2019s a concern\u201d when asked about the potential of the Dodgers pulling away from the pack, but refused to draw a line between having the highest payroll and winning titles.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there\u2019s a correlation between spending the most money and winning a championship, I still think it\u2019s a weak correlation,\u201d Steinbrenner said. \u201cSample size of data is not very big. But they earned every bit of it. \u2026 There was nothing low about my payroll and the Mets payroll and look where we ended up.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

So is it about how the Yankees are spending their money then, rather than how much they are spending?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, the intent was certainly there and the research and the homework was certainly there,\u201d Steinbrenner said. \u201cI can\u2019t complain about that. You\u2019re always looking in hindsight, and hindsight is 20\/20. Certainly some things haven\u2019t worked out, but it\u2019s not for not doing the research and homework and everything else. The team on paper, on the back of the baseball cards, is one thing. And then how they perform, particularly in the postseason, which is a bit of a crapshoot, is two different things.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou got to wait to find out the second, but make sure on the first you\u2019re getting guys that should make sense and should perform in this market and should fill these areas of need, whatever the need is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hal Steinbrenner is not naming the price of his 2026 payroll. But the Yankees owner insists he is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":306690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,164516,591,48937,2704,85],"class_list":["post-306689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-hal-steinbrenner","tag-mlb","tag-mlb-free-agency","tag-new-york-yankees","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}