"Money ball"... Fair or foul?

   With the Major League Baseball regular season in the books, I took a step back and surveyed the playoff landscape. What I saw were eight teams... eight teams coming from extremely different cities, different histories, baseball cultures, and yes, different payrolls. As some of you probably know, Baseball is the only of the four major North American sports leagues (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL) that does not have a salary cap (salary cap means the team can only spend a limited amount of money on their players). For years, people (myself being one of them) have been upset that the MLB has not taken steps to put a salary cap on the league to limit the crazy spending of the big market teams (Ya$&%ees, Red Sox, Phillies, Angles...) and help keep the small markets competitive. While I still feel like spending crazy amounts of money to "buy" championships is a lame way to do business, recently I'm not completely convinced it has as much affect on the baseball season as most would think. Let's break this down further. This season, the eight playoff teams and respective payrolls are: New York Ya$%&ees (202.7M), Texas Rangers (92.3M), Detroit Tigers (105.7M), Tampa Bay Rays (41M), Philadelphia Phillies (173M), Milwaukee Brewers (85.5M), Arizona Diamondbacks (53.6M) and St. Louis Cardinals (105.5M). New York and Philly have the number 1 and 2 payrolls in the league and the best record in their respective leagues. This would seem to support the "money ball" theory... "seem" is they key word there. You have to look all the way down the list to the 10th highest payroll where you will find Detroit (followed by St. Louis at number 11) before you find another playoff team. So only 3 of the top 10 highest paid teams in the league are playing in October. Moving down the list, we find Texas at 13th and Milwaukee at 17th giving us 3 teams in the middle third of the league. That's six teams so far... You see where I'm going with this? The last two playoff teams are Arizona at 25th and Tampa Bay at 29th (yup... 29th). That's about as even of a distribution as you could possibly hope to have (recap: 1st, 2nd, 10th, 11th, 13th, 17th, 25th, 29th). So is there any truth to the theory that the teams that spend are the teams that win? This season would seem to answer that question with a no. I want to look at one more thing before I throw in the towel on this one. Here are the last 10 World Series Champions (2001-2010) and their payroll rank for the year they won:

2001 Arizona Diamondbacks (8th)
2002 Anaheim Angels (15th)
2003 Florida Marlins (25th)
2004 Boston Red Sox (2nd)
2005 Chicago White Sox (13th)
2006 St. Louis Cardinals (11th)
2007 Boston Red Sox (2nd)
2008 Philadelphia Phillies (12th)
2009 New York Yankees (1st)
2010 San Francisco Giants (9th)

   So out of the last 10 World Series Champs, only once has the winner come from the bottom 50% of the payroll list and 5 of them came from the top 33%. I think with all the numbers in front of us, it's hard to suggest that money has nothing to do with winning. Of course, from year to year, there are bound to be surprise teams that come from the bottom of the money list and cause us all to second guess ourselves but the fact remains, teams that spend tend to win games. One other way of looking at it is winning breeds spending. Take Philly; when they won in 2008 they were 12th on the money list, in 2011 they have moved all the way to 2nd. Clearly this has a lot to do with boosted attendance. The Phillies attendance numbers rose by nearly 1 million fans per year after winning the World Series. So do small market teams need to hang on and hope for a lucky year to get the fans and owners excited and spending their cash? I don't have an answer but as a fan of one of those small market teams, I sincerely hope the ownership doesn't feel this way. Maybe the taste of winning does loosen the purse strings. Maybe it isn't such a bad thing not to have a salary cap. Maybe the Rays will win the Series this year and, once again, throw the argument into a tailspin. Whatever the case, two things will remain: Fans will argue about it and the Ya&$%ees will spend, spend, spend...

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