No kidding. In New York and Boston they also have to compete every year. If baseball in those cities doesn’t matter, MLB doesn’t matter.

Headline:

Tampa and Philly qualify for World Series: MLB Shuts Down all Operations

To put it a different way — Being in the top third of payroll obviously gives a team an advantage. But rank within that top third (notably the bleeding edge at the top) doesn’t appear to have much effect (or marginal advantage). “Necessary but not sufficient,” to use a piece of jargon.

Or, to put it yet a different way: George Steinbrenner — the only person in NY to pay full retail for everything.

2008 MLB Division Winners / Payroll rank in division / Payroll rank in baseball
TB / 5 / 29
CWS / 2 / 5
ANA / 1 / 6
PHI / 3 / 13
CHC / 1 / 7
LAD / 1 / 8

2007
BOS / 2 / 2
CLE / 5 / 23
ANA / 1 / 5
PHI / 3 / 14
CHC / 1 / 8
ARI / 5 / 26

So on and so forth, as to save space…here are the conclusions for the last 10 years

Average Division Winner payroll rank within division: 2.083/5 (nine times in ten years, a team with the lowest payroll in its division has won the division)

Average Playoff Team (incl. wild cards) payroll rank in MLB: 10.375/30

Average Number of Teams in the playoffs per year that had a payroll in the bottom 1/2 of MLB: 1.9 teams (24%)

Average Number of Teams in the playoffs per year that had a payroll in the bottom 2/3 of MLB: 3.1 teams (39%)

Average World Series Winner payroll rank in MLB: 8.6 (1st, 1st, 2nd, 2nd, 8th, five times outside the top 10, never below 20th)

Of course the MLBPA would scream bloody murder, but one thing I like about this idea is that it would only penalize the team(s) getting WAY out of proportion to the rest of baseball.

Well, the way to get the MLBPA on board is to transfer the penalty money from the overspending teams to the underspending ones, and require that money be spent on payroll. They should be doing this now with the luxury tax and revenue sharing, so that an evil SOB like Loria can’t field a team that costs less than the money the other teams are giving him and pocket the difference.

In a lot of ways New York already has a third team: it’s called the Red Sox. The NY Times reports on it like it’s a local team — and why not: they own 17% of it (though they may be tempted to sell that given everything that’s going on with the economy and newspapers). And it’s not hard to find Red Sox fans in the five boroughs (and, like many people wearing Red Sox gear in Seattle, plenty of them have never gotten mail at an address anywhere in Massachusetts).

With regard to payroll efficiency, this is something I hope one of the sites like Fangraphs or baseballprojection.com starts tracking. The latter is already calculating the projected worth on a per-player basis, and the former could start since they have wOBA and UZR. They just have to hook up with Cot’s to collect the actual payroll data to figure out which teams are over- or under- paying the most.

The New York area should have three, four teams (and they’d still do better than the worst franchises economically). That’s the equalizer.

Force the Dodgers and the Giants back to NY, that’ll do the trick.

“I hate this line of reasoning.”

I hate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, myself.

So?

Without the data, the idea that payroll is strongly coupled to performance is equally as much folk wisdom as “clubhouse chemistry.”

I freely concede I haven’t got the data myself. But googling on the string, “baseball payroll efficiency” brings up a number of hits, some by economists, no less. Here’s the abstract to one paper:

“In our 2006 paper, we examined the implications of Michael Lewis’ book for the labor market in Major League Baseball. Our tests provided econometric support for Lewis’ claim of mis-pricing in the baseball labor market’s valuation of batting skills. We also found suggestive evidence that the dispersion of statistical knowledge throughout baseball organizations was associated with a sharp attenuation of the mis-pricing. This paper takes a closer look at the economic issues raised by Lewis for the baseball labor market. We extend the sample both backward and forward in time, seeking to determine how long the pricing anomaly existed, and whether the recent attenuation in the anomaly is robust to new observations. In addition, we refine the measures of skill used in our tests to more closely match the narrative account in Lewis’ book. Using both our earlier and refined measures, we find that the pricing anomaly extends well before the period described in Moneyball, and that with some important caveats, the market correction in the post-Moneyball period persists. Finally, improvements in personnel management associated with a closer link between pay and performance may be responsible for the sharply increased correlation between winning percentage and payroll in recent years.”

On the other hand, the paper came out in 2007 — before the 2008 Phillies/Rays Series — so the improved correlation “in recent years” may again be nothing but statistical noise (aka, “luck”).

In theory this would allow teams to splurge above and beyond their regular payroll for a few years if they felt they were close to a championship and needed that last piece, yet if anyone really tries to buy out the league i.e. this offseasons’ yanks, they would be whapped pretty hard with things that would eat up that competitive advantage they have monetarily.

Of course the MLBPA would scream bloody murder, but one thing I like about this idea is that it would only penalize the team(s) getting WAY out of proportion to the rest of baseball. If many teams upped their payroll at the same time, the payroll average would also go up and thus it would mitigate the penalty some, so the MLBPA wouldn’t have as much to bitch about.

Anyway, I’m sure this idea has been thought of before and there is some aspect to it I’m not seeing that makes it infeasible, but I think its a pretty interesting idea.