Hal Steinbrenner hopes Dodgers boogeyman will distract Yankees fans from his failures

The Los Angeles Dodgers have ruffled feathers around baseball this offseason, throwing even more money into an already historically expensive roster and then turning around and landing Japanese ace Roki Sasaki for what could wind up being the most team-friendly contract in the sport. Between their big spending — Los Angeles' payroll is more than $70 million clear of the next-closest competitor, the New York Mets — and growing structural advantage in Japan, teams around the league have been wondering how they can possibly compete moving forward.

Which is fair enough — to a point. You can't blame fans of, say, the Minnesota Twins or Pittsburgh Pirates for resenting just how wide the gap has gotten between the Dodgers and some smaller-market teams, and the sport's economy continues to stretch toward a breaking point. On Tuesday, though, the Dodgers backlash may have officially jumped the shark: When Hal Steinbrenner starts wringing his hands about how the New York Yankees — yes, those New York Yankees — can't keep up with the Joneses, it's time to call BS.

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Hal Steinbrenner cries poor as Yankees offseason hits new low

Steinbrenner sat down for an interview with the YES Network that aired on Tuesday night, and while he touched on everything from a contract extension for manager Aaron Boone to losing out on Juan Soto earlier this winter, his most eye-popping comments came when he was asked about L.A.'s offseason. While you'd think that the Yankees should view this as the gauntlet being laid down by the team that just humiliated them in the World Series last fall, Steinbrenner has taken a different tack: whining.

"It's difficult for most of us owners to be able to do the kind of things that they're doing," Steinbrenner claimed, before going on to passive-aggressively imply that the Dodgers still had to make it through a long season unscathed.

Again: It's one thing for smaller markets to cry foul about how this offseason has played out. Whatever you want to say about undercapitalized owners and just how committed some of them are to winning, it's inarguable that there's a gulf between the haves and the have-nots in a sport without a salary cap.

But these are the Yankees we're talking about here — the fourth-most valuable sports franchise on planet Earth, per Forbes' estimate last year. Not too long ago they were the financial kings of the sport, and all they've done since is appreciate in value and add revenue streams. The notion that they couldn't possibly compete in this new economic landscape is rich ... until you realize that it's just Steinbrenner using the boogeyman of the moment for his convenience amid offseason unrest.

New York has been awfully quiet this month, loath to go into the final luxury-tax threshold and refusing to add salary until (or unless) it can find a way to get out from under the rest of Marcus Stroman's contract. Steinbrenner can afford to pay the highest tax penalty, but he'd rather save some money than address his team's remaining needs. That's an affirmative choice, one that deserves to be evaluated on its merits, and invoking the Dodgers right now smacks of trying to hide behind other people's righteous anger.