In a head-spinning turn of events, Carlos Correa went from being the most valuable free agent on the MLB market to the San Francisco Giants' consolation prize¹ to the cherry on top of the New York Mets' epic 2023 spending spree. (Update: it seems like this might not be the end of the saga. There may be more to come!)

In offering Correa a 12-year, $315M contract, the Mets brought their expected payroll commitments in 2023 up to $384M, more than $1M above any other team in the upcoming season.

Originally, I planned to dive into a complex data-driven analysis on this topic. How have team payrolls changed after new owners have taken control, or after labor negotiations? Does spending correlate more strongly with success on the lower end of the payroll spectrum? Which teams have stayed consistent in their spending (the Yankees are always near the top of the list), and which have been more variable (the A's have run the gamut from top to bottom)? I'm still curious about the answers to these questions, so I'd appreciate pointers to other pieces which have explored payroll disparities over time.²

However, I quickly realized that what interested me most in the events that noted punster Scott Boras³ dubbed "Correa-mas"—the deluge of fun facts which flooded Twitter in the hours and days following the almost-signings. So, I picked a few of my favorites, and present them here with a bit more data and some charts.

1. Originally from Jon Heyman (@JohnHeyman) on Twitter: "Breaking: Carlos Correa and the Mets have a deal. $315M, 12 years."

That makes Correa's Mets contract worth $26,250,000 annually.

Based on that salary, each year he will owe $9,639,735 in U.S. income taxes and $2,314,544 in New York state income taxes (assuming he's filing as married, and reporting no other income). Together, that's a total of $11,954,280 owed in taxes.

That figure—Correa's income tax bill for the year—is higher than the full annual salary of all but 122 major league players, not to mention all but a tiny fraction of all Americans.

However, Correa isn't even that close to the top of the list, salary-wise. Of the players with the five largest contracts by average annual value, four—Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Aaron Judge, and Gerrit Cole—play in New York. The other is Jacob deGrom of the Texas Rangers. By opting to play in Texas (which has no state income tax) instead of in New York, he's saving more than $3.2M each year.

2. From Travis Sawchik (@Travis_Sawchik) on Twitter: "The Mets spent more in free agency in one night ($315m) than the Pirates have spent since 2010 ($207m)"

I grabbed the numbers from ESPN and spotrac on all free agent contracts signed from 2005 onwards. I'm not sure where Sawchik's data came from, but according to these sources, the picture looks even worse. Two teams—the Pirates and the Rays—haven't spent the value of Correa's contract in all of their free agent contracts since 2005 combined.

The graph below shows the cumulative free agent spending of each team by year since 2023. On the right we see the cumulative spending by each team since 2005 (most of them are too high to be visible on the graph). Somewhere in the middle, we can see that five teams have spent less than $315M in free agency since 2010. Seventeen teams have spent less since 2020³ (four seasons ago, believe it or not). Cohen dropped that sum in one night, during an offseason in which he had already spent more than $400M on other players.

3. From Reviewing the Brew: "This signing takes the Mets 2023 payroll up to a whopping $384MM. Their luxury tax bill is in excess of $111 million. The Brewers entire payroll right now is $116 million."

In crossing the fourth and final luxury tax threshold, the Mets will now owe more in luxury tax (a competitive balance measure) than some teams will owe, period. Which teams? The usual suspects make the list.

4. Finally, a truly fun fact from Instagram: Carlos Correa has two dogs named Groot and Rocket.

No graph needed.

1. After losing out to the New York Yankees in the Aaron Judge sweepstakes.

2. I particularly appreciated this discussion on Effectively Wild about inflation-adjusted spending, and baseball-inflation-adjusted spending.

3. Among other titles.

4. On a personal note, it was depressing (yet characteristic) to see my Milwaukee Brewers on the bottom of the leaderboard in spending since 2020.