Of course they have the players to spend it on. Don’t you think a Justin Upton, for example, would look good in the middle of that lineup? (Then you trade Gardner for pitching.)
The Yankees aren’t going “100 million” over the luxury tax threshold. I suspect that they’ll be over it in 2019 or 2020, but not by a lot. And by getting under, they reset the tax at a lower rate (which is the point.)
They’re not going heavily into the free agent market. Their new pattern is to dive in every three years or so, grab three or four guys, and sit it out for a year or two. That’s not just because of luxury tax, although that is a factor, but because if they were to sign Upton, for example, or Chris Davis, or Ian Desmond, or any of a number of others, they’d have to give up a first-round draft pick.
Rather than give up a series of first picks, they’d rather give up 1, 2, and 3 in the same year. They’re trying to build a farm system — partly to keep a flow of good young players to keep winning AND reduce payroll (thus hopefully getting under the payroll threshold numerous times.)
This is smart strategy. And they can have a lot fewer problems with luxury tax and give up fewer dollars in revenue sharing, while preserving resources to be able to sign players they really want.
Right now the Yanks really aren’t dumping salary so much as they’re dumping overpriced aging stars that should have retired years ago. Once they’re gone the Yanks will start playing in free agency again, and resigning their current players to extremely high contracts so other teams can’t afford them.
They WILL be 100 mill over the cap by the end of the decade. It’s the Yanks, it’s how they do business. They have the money to spend, they have the money so that the “cap” doesn’t bother them, so they WILL spend it. Any prediction otherwise is ignoring history.