Commissioner Rob Manfred acknowledged Tuesday that Major League Baseball has a spending-disparity problem, but he isn’t publicly pointing fingers at the new face of spending in the game.

Manfred, who along with the rest of MLB watched as Steve Cohen spent wildly this offseason, suggested he does not view the Mets owner and his open wallet as an issue that must be dealt with.

“What Steve spent in the offseason was completely consistent with all of our rules. He perfectly had every right to spend all those dollars,” the MLB commissioner said in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday night during a live “The Show” podcast with The Post’s Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman. “There are actually real benefits to the game associated with that spending. It does energize the Mets’ fan base.

“The downside is spending at that level, particularly at a level that kind of steps away from everyone else, emphasizes a problem that baseball, since I started in 1987, has grappled with. And that is the disparity in the revenues that are generated in our markets produces a challenge in terms of competitive balance.”

According to Cots Contracts, the Mets’ projected luxury-tax payroll in 2023 is $375.3 million, which would shatter the record Cohen’s Mets set last season, according to the Associated Press, when the payroll reached $299.8 million.

Conversely, the Athletics have a projected luxury-tax payroll of $77.1 million, or less than the Mets are paying Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander combined this season.

With Cohen and his billions around, a new collective bargaining agreement was struck in which a fourth tax level, the so-called “Cohen tax,” was instituted in an attempt to deter aggressive owners from far outspending the competition.

Cohen — in importing Verlander, Kodai Senga, Jose Quintana and David Robertson and bringing back Brandon Nimmo, Edwin Diaz and Adam Ottavino — has blown past that $290 million threshold anyway.

MLB recently created an Economic Reform Committee in part because of the revenue disparities in the game. Manfred said the committee was formed “before Steve Cohen spent one dime in the offseason.”

The commissioner said he is less concerned about Cohen and “more concerned about making sure we have a system where Cincinnati, Oakland, Pittsburgh can compete reasonably.”

Manfred also said he believes fans would “really like” a challenge system for balls and strikes, which would be the first usage of an automated strike zone that has circled MLB for years.

The commissioner, who said he dislikes “the ‘robot ump’ thing because it really does mischaracterize what is going on,” said a challenge system would fix egregious misses by home-plate umpires.

The electronic strike zone will be used in Triple-A this season. In half of the parks, ball-and-strike calls will be made solely with the electronic strike zone. The other half will use a challenge system in which each team will have three challenges per game.

MLB is testing whether it wants to bring one of the systems into the majors.