AmateurGm.com

“Well to all teams that didn’t make the playoffs, the Yankees have set the precedent on how to bounce back and win the World Series… Spend $500 million on the best Free Agents available…. Wait.. Your team cant do that???  Sorry, thanks for playing.”

I found this post the other day as I was browsing through the 2009 World Series stories at MLB.com.  It instantly got me thinking, do MLB general managers really buy teams or is this some ticked off Pirates fan?  Could this possibly be a disgruntled New York Mets fan that isn’t happy because his team didn’t buy the “right” players?  Can teams and championships simply be bought by just shelling out enough money, with a nice trophy as a reward?

I decided I’d get to the bottom of the payroll vs. playoff matter. I pieced together some data from the USA Today regarding the correlation between payroll and playoff teams.  I compiled a list of playoff teams from the past decade and then proceeded to find each playoff team’s total payroll and payroll rank in that given year.

Clearly the top spenders will be the teams in the playoffs, right? It only makes sense because they have a larger talent pool to pull from. There isn’t anyone or anything that is off limits. If you need a big starting pitcher or a guy that can mash in the middle of your lineup, you can just go pick up an over-priced free agent. Isn’t that why we have a class system in high school sports, so the playing field can be level? Everyone knows that if they didn’t have a class system, a small under-populated team and school without a talent pool would never have a chance against the mega-schools. Sure there are once-in-a-century stories like Hoosiers and the Bad News Bears, but that only happens in the movies. This is not Hollywood. Gene Hackman isn’t going to barge through the door and give a motivational speech to elevate the team and pull off the impossible. It just doesn’t happen. We live in a Jerry Maguire world, “Show me the money!”

Major League Baseball is different than every other professional sport.  The way the game is played and the model of consistency that must be established for success is different than any other sport.  Baseball has a grueling schedule and the game takes a toll on one’s body, but in a different way than football or basketball.  The roster has different lengths and different requirements in different months.  The playoff format has eight teams, not 12 or 16.  In baseball numerous players have been traded after the no-trade deadline, which is something you don’t see in football.  Baseball has an intricate network of minor league teams.  The player draft has over 40 rounds and once a year they even draft players that are currently on other teams (Rule 5 Draft). However, arguably the biggest difference is that there is no salary cap.  Even though they impose a luxury tax, teams such as the Yankees are not afraid to pay it because they have all the resources they need to succeed and no salary cap to stop them.

In 2000, the New York Yankees played the New York Mets in the first “Subway Series” since 1956.  The New York Yankees won the series in five games, handedly beating their cross-town rivals. That year the Yankees had the largest payroll in the game at $92.9 million, with the Mets owning the 6th largest payroll at $79.8 million. The average payroll for a playoff team that year was a mere $61.8 million.  Ten years later, the Yankees once again took home the crown with the highest payroll at $201.4 million.  The average payroll for a playoff team that year (2009) was $109.9 million.  In simply ten years the average payroll of a playoff team nearly doubled.

Over the course of the past ten years, the average payroll rank for playoff teams has been 11, with an annual total bill of $91.6 million.  If you want to hoist the trophy, however, your average rank is 9.1 and a payroll of $102.2 million. I heard Bud Selig rave that parity was as great as it has ever been! Twenty-three different teams made the playoffs in the past decade, that’s 76.7% of teams in the league.  Does it really matter that four of those teams only made it once? At least they were there, right?  The truth is that teams have to spend money to win championships anymore, the numbers prove it.  Maybe small market teams should form a different view of success.  Maybe just getting there should be enough. Should the Tampa Bay Rays and Minnesota Twins adopt that philosophy?

Well at least we have the Florida Marlins who beat the “Evil Empire” in 2003 with the 25^th ranked payroll, more than $100 million less than the Yankees. I wonder if Gene Hackman gave them a speech before Game Six?