Figuring out what the Mets’ actual payroll has been at any given time over the past decade-plus has always been something of a shell game. But as this offseason continues and the team presumably ignores the best—and most expensive—of the available free agents, it’s important to remember that there’s a difference between actual payroll and the theoretical payroll that’s used by Major League Baseball to determine whether or not a team will be required to pay a competitive balance tax, commonly referred to as the CBT or luxury tax.
Those two figures are spelled out over at Cot’s Contracts, which has always been a great resource for these sorts of things.