There are always other factors, as you rightly point out.

“It’s telling to see that the two likely World Series teams both spent less than $1 million per win.”

Yes, well on the flip side the #s 1-3 all made the playoffs and #4 just barely fell short after a fairly substantial collapse. #5 is last years WS champs.

I’m not sure this means as much as most people think it does, because baseball doesn’t have a true free market for talent. Good, young teams are artificially cheaper than they might otherwise be, because teams can control good young players for an artificially cheap salary for six years – at least the first three years (before arb-eligibility) will be cheap, and usually the first year of arbitration as well. So, there will often be a 2-3 year lag between when good, young, cheap team becomes a good, less-young, spendier team – assuming the team has the resources to keep that team together once they have to get paid.

Of course, this doesn’t excuse the Mariners, who’ve sucked (and then sucked a little lsss each year) while spending gobs of money. But it does skew the analysis a bit. You’d be better off looking at marginal wins/$ over rolling 4 or 5-year periods, I think, to get a more accurate picture.

(not necessarily saying you’re that guy, just using it by way of example)

I’m sure you have some good things to say, but if your posts are difficult to read, people generally won’t take the time to figure it out.

It’s that there’s a convention around people’s names, and silly or not, getting Jo-El’s name (or spelling it “Rick Rizz”) gets your comment nuked with a bracketed spelling correction unless the mods have an enormous amount of time to fix it.

…such as this jp guy…

This is similar to the Organizational Rankings discussion of the other day.

The top 5 highest payroll teams in 2007 either made the playoffs, or nearly did. But teams # 23, 24, 25, 26 in payroll also made the playoffs (if you include San Diego), while two mid-payroll teams made the playoffs.

So, both payroll and how well a team is run are important. Dave ranked all teams based on his opinion of which were the most well-run. I calculated some Winning Percentages based on both Dave’s ranking of quality of management and on payroll.

The top one-third of “Well-Run” teams 2006-7 combined Winning Percentage: .520

The bottom one-third (”worst-run”) teams 2006-7 combined Winning %: .466

Payroll was not a big factor; payrolls were similar between these two groups, averaging $86 Million vs $78 Million for 2006-7 combined. Dave’s well-run teams are basically equally distributed among both low and high payroll teams; similarly, the poorly-run teams have nearly equal numbers of high and low payroll clubs.

Looking at payroll alone, regardless of how well-run the teams are, the differential between the biggest and smallest spenders averaged across 2006-7 is not quite as big:

2006-7 Win. % for top one-third highest-payroll teams: .519
2006-7 Win. % for bottom-third lowest-payroll teams: .472

Looking at the 10 playoff or near playoff teams (counting SD and NYM):

Well-Run:
6 were top-third “well-run” teams
1 was a bottom-third “worst-run” team (3 were middle-third well-run teams)

Payroll:
6 were Hi-Payroll Teams (top 10 payrolls)
4 were below-50th-percentile Payroll Teams

Looking at how many teams in 2007 made or nearly made the playoffs based on the combination of how Well-Run and High-vs-Low Payroll:

3/5 Hi-Pay, Well-Run teams made playoffs
3/10 Hi-Pay, Average- and Poorly-Run teams made playoffs

3/6 Lo-Pay, Well-Run teams made playoffs
1/9 Lo-Pay, Average- and Poorly-Run teams made playoffs

So, higher payroll teams do win more. But well-run teams win even more, regardless of payroll.

The only poorly-run team to make the playoffs in 2007 was a high-payroll team (Philadelphia). Not one low-pay, poorly-run team made it.

The Mariners, as you know, were Hi-Payroll, Poorly-Run.