Money Ball: Are Teams Getting Bang for Their Buck?

This week I decided to focus my post on an attempt to find some connection between a team's salary and wins this season, taking into account different age factors. What I hope to discover is the foundation upon which a winning team is built. To start, I decided to narrow my focus to just a few teams. In this instance, it seemed fitting to choose both the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays, seeing as these are the two teams in the World Series and the only teams left playing meaningful games this season. I also chose both New York teams, the Mets and the Yankees, because both of these teams defied expectations in failing to even make it to the playoffs.

To begin my analysis, I searched for a listing of team payrolls (the total salaries of players on the major league roster on open day) and found it on the CBS Sports website. A close examination of this table provides interesting results as we find the two World Series teams ranking 29 out of 30 (Tampa Bay) and 13 out of 30 (Philadelphia) in terms of highest opening day payroll. The Rays have a team salary of $43,820,598, higher only than Florida, whose $21 million team salary is less than half that of any other team in the league. Philadelphia has a team salary of $98,269,881, which ranked third lowest amongst playoff teams (Milwaukee and Tampa Bay were lower). The two New York teams on the other hand, ranking 1 out of 30 (Yankees) with a $209,081,579 team salary and 3 out of 30 (Mets) with a $138,293,378 team salary, both failed to bring playoff baseball to New York in the final year of both Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium.

A team's payroll is indicative of a number of things. First, large payrolls likely indicate famous players either right in their prime or towards the tail end of it. This is because players tend to receive their largest contracts between the ages of 25 and 30 (typically where one is expected to enjoy his most productive seasons). Thus, smaller payrolls can be indicative of either less star power or simply younger players that will not reach free-agency for a few years and are signed to team-friendly contracts. I believe both of these principles are applicable to the teams in question, with the Mets and Yankees representing the failures of large payrolls and the Rays and Phils showing how success does not have to be so expensive.

A better way to get an idea of how efficiently a team goes about trying to win is to take the team's payroll and divide it by that team's wins from the regular season. In Tampa Bay's case, with their 97 wins (third best in the majors) and small payroll, each win this season cost them only around $451,758. The Phillies, with 92 wins, paid $1,068,150 per win. The Yankees and the Mets, who both finished the season with 89 wins, paid $2,349,231 and $1,553,858 respectively per win. There must be a good explanation for the apparent discrepancy between the successes and failures of this year's Major League Baseball season.

Another factor that may prove relevant in this situation is the average age of the team. ESPN.com provides a table ordered by team's average age. Here, we see Tampa Bay rank 5 out of 30 in terms of youngest average age at just 27.2 years. The Yankees are next with an age of 28.9 and a rank of 21 out of 30. The Mets and Phillies round out the bottom of the table, finishing 28 out of 30 and 30 out of 30, respectively at 30.3 and 31.3 years of age. This does not appear to tell us much, however, as it is not clear that any conclusions can be reached on the basis of this data alone.

Although the average age may not have provided that much insight into what seems to make a team successful, the age of a team's most significant players can provide such insight. Take a look at the Rays and the Phillies. At their core, both teams are comprised of homegrown talent and cheaply (relatively speaking) signed veterans and role players. The Rays are

the perfect example of a contender built from the ground up. The Rays were an expansion team created ten years ago and their focus has always been on drafting high-risk, high-return players in an attempt to build a winner. This policy has finally paid off as the likes of Carl Crawford, BJ Upton, Evan Longoria and the emerging David Price (pictured to the left) all have played huge parts in Tampa's unlikely run to the World Series. In some ways, Tampa Bay's lack of success in the first years of the organization might repay itself as their poor record constantly gave them high draft picks with which to develop All-Star caliber talents. Their poor record also allowed them to take risks signing unproven or aging players to cheap, incentive laden contracts. This is what they did with Carlos Pena, who has been exceptional at the heart of this Rays lineup throughout the past few seasons.

Philadelphia follows in a similar mold. Although the Phillies' payroll is substantially higher than Tampa Bay's, the centerpieces of the team are younger players signed to cheaper contracts. In Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins and Cole Hamels, the Phillies have four homegrown stars, of whom only Howard is making at least $10,000,000 (not such a substantial number in the world of baseball). Although the Phillies have signed a few veterans to large, overpriced contracts, the majority of their production comes from cheap, rising talents, only just entering their prime.

The Yankees provide a stark contrast to the Rays and Phillies. Although their average age was not particularly high, the significant players on the Yankees roster are all well closer to 30 than they are to 20. The Yankees have a huge payroll because they like are always willing to overpay established veterans for too many years. The current Yankees can be seen as a team suffering from bad long term contracts. Although normally the team to compete with, this year it seems the Yankees age finally caught up with them. A majority of their players have had wonderful, perhaps even Hall of Fame worthy careers and yet, if they are all at the back end of their baseball lives, the team just is not going to win. There is a large talent gap between the Yankees' aging stars of yesteryear and growing stars of tomorrow, and it really showed this season.

The Mets, like the Yankees, have such a high payroll and failed to make it to the playoffs because they opted for the priciest players that may have already experienced their best years. An ailing Pedro Martinez and a cumbersome Luis Castillo are just two examples of overpaid, underperforming Mets. Carlos Beltran, the Mets highest paid player has never lived up to his huge contract. Carlos Delgado seemingly chose not to play half of last season and Billy Wagner was out for large parts of the season due to injury. The natural decline due to aging played a factor in the substandard performance of some of these players and the Mets will be glad to see Wagner and Martinez's contracts end.

In the end, it seems the New York teams' decision to go with primarily established stars over internally developed players hurt them. Rising contract prices and a number of bad signings and trades are forcing both these teams to reconsider their methods. It is causing them to adopt the methods of the Rays and Phillies. Intense scouting and high-risk, high-reward drafting policies allow teams to pick up impact players while they are young and cheap and develop them as they please. Instead of constantly competing for free-agents that may or more not perform, but will get paid big bucks regardless, teams that build a young core of talented players stand the best chance of consistently being a competitive and winning team. One important point to make note of here, and one which I hope to discuss in the following weeks, is that the financial restrictions placed on teams like the Rays (due to lack of stadium attendance and fan activity) may prevent them from resigning essential players once their current contracts are up. Instead, they could be forced to trade off all of their stars before they hit free-agency in an attempt to get some talent in return, just as their in-state competitors, the Florida Marlins were forced to do just a year after winning the World Series.