The 2021-22 MLB offseason may go down as one of the most eventful in league history, and not just because of the three-month collective bargaining agreement (CBA) negotiation that ended with some major rule changes and every team playing a bunch of doubleheaders this year.

Teams spent enormous amounts on free agents, and the trade market wasn't far behind activity-wise.

The New York Mets threw the full weight of Steve Cohen's hedge fund money to make a contender (assuming Jacob deGrom throws a pitch this season). The Texas Rangers spent more on contract guarantees in a single offseason than any team in the history of baseball, dropping a half-billion dollars on a middle infield of Corey Seager and Marcus Semien. The Los Angeles Dodgers responded to losing Seager by adding Freddie Freeman and the usual pile of assorted parts that will probably post a collective 3.25 ERA with 10.6 K/9.

The Boston Red Sox, Philadelphia Phillies, Minnesota Twins, Toronto Blue Jays, Seattle Mariners, Detroit Tigers and Colorado Rockies (!) all signed players to nine-figure deals. The Atlanta Braves acquired Matt Olson, the New York Yankees acquired Josh Donaldson.

The CBA may have changed how teams do business in a few respects, but the top-tier free agent money flowed before the lockout and it flowed after the lockout.

Ideally, your team was good last year and made an actual effort to stay competitive this offseason. Then again, it's all relative, so here's where every MLB team was last year and how much more money they were willing to spend, as shown by the change in 40-man payroll used for competitive balance tax purposes, as calculated by the ever-handy Cot's Contracts on Tuesday.

You can basically divide that chart into four quadrants: the contenders (upper right), the ascenders (lower right), the rebuilders (lower left) and the retreaters (upper left). In your basic, min-maxing of assets in a rebuilding cycle, you would see a team moving counter-clockwise around the pack: Losing, so you spend less money until your prospects start producing. Then, you spend actual money on your contender and win ... until you start losing again.

It doesn't quite work like that for some teams — the Dodgers have been spending and winning for a decade-plus — but it's the vision that most owners will try to sell on fans when they're on the left side. It should also be noted that this chart doesn't reflect where teams were before this offseason; the Cleveland Guardians and San Diego Padres may be close together, but one team has a $200 million-plus payroll and the other is the Guardians.

The Mets spent extraordinary amounts of money this offseason. Not only do they have Max Scherzer on an MLB-record $43.3 million average annual salary, they also brought in names like Chris Bassitt, Starling Marte, Mark Canha and Eduardo Escobar to go from a $207.7 million CBT payroll (fifth in baseball) to $279.4 million (second, behind the Dodgers).

Meanwhile, the Oakland Athletics, fresh off an 86-win season, have stripped their recently good team to the studs and Frankie Montas (for now). There might have been decent reasons for steering into the skid (they have one of MLB's worst farm systems and every major name they traded was a year or two from free agency), but you can imagine ownership didn't need decent reasons to make one of baseball's cheapest teams even cheaper.

Does spending money lead to more wins in MLB?

The other odd placement here is the San Francisco Giants, whom you might have heard won 107 games last year. Few teams in MLB history have ascended more unexpectedly, and now they head into 2022 with a team cheaper than last year's by CBT standards. Of course, spending like their NL West rivals would mean doubling down on a team projections aren't exactly optimistic about replicating their success.

How pessimistic? Well ...

Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA, which the outlet will openly admit missed on the Giants last year, has San Francisco winning about 29 fewer games this season. We'll see how that works out.

As for teams whose 2021 won't be described as "magical until the NLDS," there's a pretty clear trend line of "spend money, get better." In a perfect world, you're in the upper left contract (who wouldn't want to slash salary and get better), but you may notice every team in that quadrant was awful last year. So this probably isn't a case of Mike Rizzo and Mike Hazen being geniuses so much as a projection being too conservative to say last year's worst teams will be as bad again.

Once again, the Mets look like an outlier. No team comes close to their payroll increase this offseason, but that at least seems to have bought them as much optimism for improvement as any other team.