Everyone knows richer teams do better. A well-funded team—let’s call them the “Yew Nork Nankees”—has a major advantage because it can retain its homegrown players past their cost-controlled years and bring in high-paid stars via trade or free agency. The richest of the rich can stay afloat even when one of their most expensive players turns into a bust.
Meanwhile, a poorer club—say, the “Rampa Tay Bays”—could find itself in a constant state of rebuilding. Any shot at contention has to come from cheap young players, who will most likely leave town as free agents (if they’re not traded during their arbitration years). This franchise can’t afford to fill each hole in the depth chart with a star, and a single bad contract could cripple the team for years.
The impact of money in Major League Baseball is declining, but it’s still a large part of the game for some teams. The New York Yankees (who, interestingly enough, bear a strong resemblance to my hypothetical Yew Nork Nankees) field a strong team every year thanks to their ginormous payroll. Meanwhile, the bargain-basement Tampa Bay Rays (sort of like the Rampa Tay Bays, but not nearly as fun to say) wallowed in mediocrity for the 10 years of their existence thanks largely to their small budget.
But winning teams aren’t always well-funded—Michael Lewis wouldn’t have had a story if the Oakland Athletics juggernauts of the early 2000′s not been built so cheaply. Of course, the converse is also true; as the New York Mets have shown us over the last few years, a nine-digit payroll can still produce a bad team.
How can we figure out which teams get the highest marginal benefit from each extra dollar their owners shell out? To try and find an answer, I ran the correlations between each team’s Opening Day payrolls (h/t: USA Today‘s salary database) and win totals since 2001. I chose the last 10 years because it was long enough for almost every team to have experienced both rises and declines, but also recent enough that most clubs’ front offices haven’t changed much.
Below are the results (click for a bigger view). Correlations are scored from -1 to 1. A high positive number means a very strong relationship between payroll and wins, a negative number meaning the team did worse as its budget went up, and 0 meaning the two variables are completely unrelated. For some perspective, I’ve included how many standard deviations (a relative measure of how much a score differs from the average) each team’s correlation is from the mean (μ = .033, σ = .407).
A word of caution about these results: a high score is not necessarily good or bad. On the surface it seems like it would be a positive, representing a team making wise investments and getting lots of bang for its buck—there are plenty of teams towards the bottom who have experienced some expensive failures in recent years.
But cheap successes can drag teams’ scores down, too. The Athletics’ low ranking is tainted by their incredible Moneyball run at the start of the decade. Sure, deals like Eric Chavez’ and Ben Sheets’ didn’t work out very well, but surpassing the 103 games Oakland won with a $40 million payroll in 2002 would be a tall order for any franchise, no matter how wealthy.
In addition, this model treats involuntary payroll increases (i.e., arbitration raises) when the team is simply spending more on someone it already had as the same as free agent signings or contract extensions. Moreover, consistent teams’ scores seem to be exaggerated just by the nature of the analysis. For example, the Yankees’ payroll has been the highest in the league every year and only once this decade have they dipped below 94 wins; no sane person would argue that their increased spending makes them worse.
Still, I think these results are quite interesting. It’s certainly shouldn’t be used as a primary measure of how good teams front offices are—the correlation between these rankings and FanGraphs‘ preseason Baseball Operations rankings is just .095. But I think this paints a telling picture about the marginal value of a dollar to each MLB team.
Want to have Wahoo Blues updates sent directly to your news feed? Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!
Original Story:
http://www.wahooblues.com/2011/04/27/...
