View Full Version : Compare Baseball Teams Payroll and Performance
Sooo... does money buy wins or is it intangibles like players performing and managers strategizing?
Every year, a few teams try to answer the same question: "Can money buy baseball championships?"
It doesn't always work out that way. The Yankees had Major League Baseball's top payroll every year from 2001 through 2013, but won only one World Series in that span. This year, the Dodgers are looking to buck the trend, with the highest payroll in baseball ever.
Choose a team and a year from the lists below to create a matchup, and hover over the circles to view stats for players in that position for a given year.
LA Times: Compare MLB team payrolls (http://graphics.latimes.com/mlb-salaries-2014/#yankees-2014:dodgers-2014)
The Nationals have almost twice the payroll of the Pirates, and only 7 more wins to show for it? The Yankees have almost triple the payroll of the Pirates, and virtually the same record?
Very Interesting.
Of course, there are other factors involved, including the simple fact that yesterday's performance (which helps to determine a players future salary) is no guarantee of future performance. Stuff happens.
Twelve.
K0RGR
09-11-2014, 11:41 AM
The Twinkies are usually near the bottom, and they've even made the playoffs from there quite a few times. Note that currently, about 1/3 of their entire payroll goes to pay for Joe Mauer, a light-hitting first baseman who used to be a top catcher until his knees gave out. This year, they have been fairly pathetic, but shown some improvement over last year. People are starting to ask for the manager to take a hike, but I suspect they would be much lousier without him.
Among other things, one of the reasons I changed from being a Met fan was for similar short-sightedness when it came to players contracts. Case in point, Bobby Bonilla. Bonilla who lost the ability to play half-decently when he became a Met (as many others before him have), got a Cinderfella contract from those same Mets. One of the provisions was that he'd get a cool $1.2 Million every year until 2035. And he does. Despite not playing any baseball since 2001, he collects every year.
There's this from ESPN:
LAST JULY, in her New York office, a financial planner by the exquisitely apt name of Jennifer Prosperino received her weekly call from a longtime client. He was a semiretired man in Florida who'd grown up evading gunfire in the South Bronx, where he'd lived in firetrap apartment buildings with junkies in the hallways. He slept with a baseball bat in his bed, dreaming of a better life. His first question for Prosperino was the one he always asked: "Am I going to be okay?"
Days earlier, the client, employed part time by his former union, had received a check from the New York Mets (http://espn.go.com/mlb/team/_/name/nym/new-york-mets) for $1,193,248.20 -- the first of 25 annual, identical payments he is guaranteed from a club he last played for in 1999. That means Bobby Bonilla (http://espn.go.com/mlb/player/_/id/1689/bobby-bonilla), 49, will make more money than 17 players on the Mets' Opening Day roster.
For years, we have been talking about Mets owner Fred Wilpon and his doomed investments with Bernie Madoff. And the payments to Bonilla, whom Wilpon once made the highest-paid player in baseball, stand as a legacy of that relationship, the repercussions of which continue to resonate in Flushing: This year's team slashed $43.4 million off last year's Opening Day payroll, which is believed to be the largest one-year salary drop in MLB history.
The Importance of Being Bobby Bo Bob Brain (http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/7879021/mlb-new-york-mets-pay-bobby-bonilla-millions-years-come-espn-magazine)
Guess there was a reason he was such a (s)crappy player for the Mutts.
This from The Sporting News:
Bobby Bonilla is still getting over on the New York Mets.
The club, struggling to make payroll and looking to sell part of the franchise to stay above water, deferred nearly $6 million in Bonilla’s final year with the team and added an 8 percent interest rate that will start to be paid out on July 1 as part of a deal that helped the Mets release Bonilla, the New York Post reports. That turned Bonilla’s original $5.9 million salary to nearly $30 million. The Mets will pay Bonilla $1.2 million annually for the next 25 years despite him not having played for them since 1999 or in the big leagues since 2001.
Mets will be paying Bobby Bonilla for next 25 years (http://www.sportingnews.com/mlb/story/2011-05-16/mets-will-be-paying-bobby-bonilla-for-next-25-years)
Yep. They'll be paying him 1.2 Million George Washingtons to sit on his ass. Beat the Mets, beat the Mets...
Comparing the KC Royals to the SF Giants, the Royals won a game more than the Giants despite the Royals payroll being over $50 Million less.
That's including the Royals Designated Hitter that the Giants don't have in the NL.
Comparison HERE (http://graphics.latimes.com/mlb-salaries-2014/#royals-2014:giants-2014).
Ask the question again after the World Series. I'm not saying that the Royals are not a good team but the Moneyball type of teams frequently fail to win championships even after a stellar regular season. Take the original Moneyball team, the Oakland A's, for example.
Also, the team tends not to be cohesive over a number of seasons—that is, they might have a roster that clicks for a season, maybe two, but after that the best players move on to other teams who are willing to pay them more. The Giants, on the other hand, have been to three World Series over the last five years.
ON EDIT: At that site, when you click to sort between salary and wins, the Padres logo doesn't move.
Oh, I don't know. A Scrappy Marlins team beat the Yanks a few years back with a much smaller payroll and that has already happened to the Dodgers this year.
K7SGJ
10-20-2014, 08:51 AM
Ask the question again after the World Series. I'm not saying that the Royals are not a good team but the Moneyball type of teams frequently fail to win championships even after a stellar regular season. Take the original Moneyball team, the Oakland A's, for example.
Also, the team tends not to be cohesive over a number of seasons—that is, they might have a roster that clicks for a season, maybe two, but after that the best players move on to other teams who are willing to pay them more. The Giants, on the other hand, have been to three World Series over the last five years.
ON EDIT: At that site, when you click to sort between salary and wins, the Padres logo doesn't move.
That's because.........the Padres don't move, either.
We lost our seats.
For the past 2 years, we had seats 16 - 18 in Section 323, Row J, at PNC Park. Although you wouldn't guess it from that description, we actually were the front row -- we were right over one of the "entrance tunnels".
So, near the end of the season, our rep tells the Boss that she's got some better seats in mind for us, for the same price (that we'd be paying for 323J, that is). We were OK with where we were, but figured OK, we'd talk to her about it.
What she didn't, or couldn't, tell us at the time... we HAD to pick new seats. We have a 1/4 Season Ticket Holder plan, and the first few rows of our section had been re-designated for Full Season Ticket Holders only; the next few rows had been re-designated for Half Season Ticket Holders (and Full, of course) only.
We find all this out on Sunday. We were supposed to be at the park on Saturday afternoon, in one of the first groups to pick, but had a conflict (college tour visit with Little Miss Field Day), so we dropped in on Sunday. Little did we know... had we known, we'd have stopped on the way home Saturday afternoon. Most of the seats along the 3rd base line that we really wanted were already gone.
We're going to end up in Section 318, Row Q. Just on the 3rd base side of home plate, right below the press box, next to last row in the section. (Seats 6,7, and 9. No seat 8, there's a supporting I-beam there. Don't ask, at least it won't be in front of us) They're not BAD seats, mind you, just much further from the field than we would have liked.
Oh, and we're also NOT automatically getting tickets to the Home Opener this year. No longer available to 1/4 STH plans. Not that the price dropped any.
This is the prices of success. The Pirates have already pre-sold so many STH plans that they are shoving people around and dropping the perks. (The last time we went in to pick new seats, 2 years ago, they had hot dogs, burgers, chicken wings, and so forth. This year? Coffee, decaf, hot chocolate, water and soft drinks. No food.) They're doing it because they can.
The boss is fuming that 15 years of "loyalty" have gone out the window. (The only thing "loyalty" got us was an earlier slot that we couldn't use due to a prior commitment.) She hasn't faced the reality yet: When the team is or becomes successful, there is no loyalty to the long-time fans, only "what have you done for me lately?"
The boss is fuming that 15 years of "loyalty" have gone out the window. [...] She hasn't faced the reality yet: When the team is or becomes successful, there is no loyalty to the long-time fans, only "what have you done for me lately?"
Boy, can I ever relate to that.
For the first few years after I moved to San Diego, I'd regularly attend Padres games at Jack Murphy/Qualcomm where even the best seats in the house (excluding those directly behind home plate that are reserved for VIPs, of course) went for $35 and the relatively low cost of food made for a cheap night of fun.
Fast forward to 1998, when the team went all the way to the World Series and, in their euphoria over the best Padres team ever, San Diego voters passed a bond issue to provide public funding of a new downtown ballpark. Once the team moved into Petco Park at the beginning of the 2004 season, the "what have you done for me lately" mentality raised it's ugly head big time. Ticket prices went way up, food and beer prices too (and, to add insult to injury, the beer isn't even cold anymore). More importantly, perhaps, the owners reneged on their promise to field a competitive team. In the last ten years, the team has finished over .500 only four times!
Makes me glad I voted against the bond issue.
W2NAP
10-20-2014, 11:52 AM
The boss is fuming that 15 years of "loyalty" have gone out the window. (The only thing "loyalty" got us was an earlier slot that we couldn't use due to a prior commitment.) She hasn't faced the reality yet: When the team is or becomes successful, there is no loyalty to the long-time fans, only "what have you done for me lately?"
man i think that goes for any sporting events. look at the NFL colts, pre luck&manning they would give away tickets to the colts games. tickets were cheap as long as they stayed the 1-15 to 3-13 (always one of the worst teams). Manning came, we started having 13-3 seasons.. not many tickets given away, and the prices yep skyrocketed.
its nice having a winning team in the backyard, but it comes at a cost of high prices. and with them high prices it gets harder to sell tickets.. (the IND-KC playoff game was almost blacked out cause they couldn't sell out. why? people couldn't really afford it, they ended up giving the extra tickets away.)
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