ESPN reports Teixeira to Yanks
DMZ · December 23, 2008 at 12:51 pm · Filed Under Mariners
That’s a great fit for the Yankees, really. They’ve got the money to spend and it pays off for them. This should be a huge upgrade and help their drive to improve run prevention too.
Plus it means the M’s don’t have to see him 20 games a year.
Dave vents about this move over at Fangraphs. I’m not in favor of a salary cap, but at some point, MLB has to do something to bring the Yankees back into line with the rest of the game.
Comments
91 Responses to “ESPN reports Teixeira to Yanks”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
[dupe]
Wow, that bums me out.
I have enjoyed watching the Yankees reap the rewards of bad free agent decisions and short-sighted management over the last few years, but this move is much less likely to blow up in their faces.
As the ESPN article stated, this gives the Yanks the four highest paid players in baseball. One of those players is Jeter, though, and the coupling of his paycheck with his barely-above-average performance can still put a smile on my face.
So it looks like the Yanks spent close to what 430 Million this offseason?
I’m not going to miss having him around the AL West.
So what are they doing with Swisher now? Does he play RF? Damon in left and Cabrera in right, with Matsui to DH? Is that outfield as miserable defensively as I think it is?
I like how things are going so far in the offseason for the m’s. That being said the yankees make me sick…
this is great news! How perfect of a DH for the m’s is matsui?
Watch the Yankees do something insane like trade Melky + prospects for Cameron, then trade Matsui away so they can have Manny as their DH.
As Gump said, as much as I love the M’s offseason so far, the Yankees make it feel as though our moves are so very small and insignificant.
It is now 8 years, $180 million.
Are the Yankees done signing FA?
How many draft picks do they have to give up after signing 3 type A FA? I am pretty sure they don’t have 3 1st round picks to give up. Does that mean they lose the 1st round pick to the Brewers, the 2nd round pick to the Angels and the 3rd round pick to the Jays? How does that work?
The picks are handed over based on how the signed players ranked in the compensation formula.
I’ve also enjoyed watching the Yankees sign bad free agents to long term contracts that backfire on them. Hopefully CC won’t be the pitcher they think he is, and Burnett will continue to be on the DL more than he isn’t. I have a feeling CC will break under the pressure of the NY fans. They were all complaining about how bad signing him was the day he signed! I’m so glad I’m not a Yankee fan.
I find it much more fun to watch Big Z find a bargain free agent or make a great trade than throwing money at big time free agents. Signing a big name free agent is easy to do. Putting together a team that competes with those big name free agents and costs just a fraction is way more fun, in my opinion. Go Big Z, and GO M’s!!!
I think their 1st goes to the Angels and the 2nd goes to the Brewers.
I’ve been following this all day over at BTF. What was amusing was that there was a ‘TEX TO MAYBE POSSIBLY SIGN SOON WITH RED SOX!!!11′ thread going on. Oops.
As long as these moves don’t work, it’s fun. Once they get a nucleus that works though, it’ll suck all of the enjoyment out of the sport. It brings back the idea I had earlier that every year on opening day we declare the Yankees the World Champions, congratulate them, and then the other 29 teams play a season and playoff rounds…
I’m new to the site and dnk how to take part of someone elses comment and add onto it. can anyone tell me which button to hit. sorry wont ask again.
so, that’s about a $70M infield?
cut and paste the quote, leave it highlighted and click the bquote button.
Thanks msb.
Here is how the draft picks pan out now, according to mlbtraderumors.com
Here in Chicago, I thought you were cheering for Carlos Zambrano, the original Big Z.
You understand CC’s contract has an opt out clause after 3 years, right? It’s essentially a 3 yr contract, and if he doesn’t like NYC, he can opt out after 3 years. With Wang and Joba, they might have 3 #1 starters, and a #2 in Burnett.
But even with CC, Tex and Burnett, I am not sure if they are better than the Rays and the Red Sox. They are better than 08, but Mussina was a 20 game winner, and they lose a .876 OPS DH in Giambi, and a .843 OPS RF in Bobby Abreu. And Matsui could be gone to trim payroll. I am not sure adding Swisher and Tex will add how many wins on the offensive side. I think having CC and a healthy Wang will be the main improvement over 08. I would think they are a little better than the Red Sox now, and on par with the Rays. They are the co-favorites in the AL to go to the WS. But I wouldn’t crown them the WS champs in 09 yet.
Saying Joba is a #1 starter is like declaring Morrow a #1 starter already imo. Joba hasn’t even pitched a full season as a starter yet.
I don’t have a problem with this. This just encourages innovation from the other teams.
Dave mentioned over at Fangraphs that The Yankees have the four highest paid position players in baseball, but note that one of them (Jeter) isn’t nearly as good as his salary would make him look.
The solution, should MLB want to view this as a problem and address it, would be to put more teams in New York.
Failing that, a revenue sharing plan like the Zumsteg Plan that was published on BP like 5 years ago. That was a decent plan that rewarded success, and only penalised teams for being in huge markets.
“Dave vents about this move over at Fangraphs. I’m not in favor of a salary cap, but at some point, MLB has to do something to bring the Yankees back into line with the rest of the game.”
- Yeah, They should do some revenue sharing or something like that. Wait a second….
Yep, that’s true. But three years can be a long time in NY if the fans don’t like you. One can only hope, right?
While it always looks impressive when the Yankees do FA hauls, I’ll point out that they won their World Championships when their home grown nucleus of Jeter/Posada/Rivera/Pettitte/Williams was at their peak. The problem with building through free agency is you’re continually bringing in and playing players who are on the wrong side of 30, and losing offensive and defensive value.
I think Kennedy, Cano, Hughes and other products of the Yankee farm system are more important for their future chances at a world championship, not the latest guy they sign to Monopoly money free agent deals for $Texas. Those are the players you can hope for to GROW from year to year. Granted, players who are very, very good have a lot further to fall and can certainly help, but please note that A-Rod, RJ, Giambi, Matsui, and some premiere signings in the past have bupkiss in the way of rings as Yankees.
I’d missed that the luxury tax assessments went out yesterday, with the Yanks being charged $26.9M …
A-Rod: $32M in 2009
Jeter: $20M
Cano: $6M
Teixeira: ~$22M
Posada: $13.1M
Including catcher, that’s a $93.1M infield, give or take 500K.
Wang really isn’t a ‘#1 guy’. And, like Gump said, Joba hasn’t really proved much more (or as much) as Morrow.
Based on last year’s tRA numbers, I’d count Burnett as a #1 starter.
He just didn’t look like one because he was on the same staff as the best pitcher in baseball.
Wang is a really solid 3 or number 2 guy. Joba has ace potential but looks to be a number 3 or 2 and I agree Burnett is a number “1″ starter.
so, bigger than two-thirds of MLB payrolls?
oh, yay! Steve Kelley on the radio! such excitement.
Who really care who’s number 1,2,or 3. Wang, Burnett and Sabathia are all very good. Thats all that matters.
I don’t like the Yankees ability to keep their Big Units and Juniors and A-Rods and Tino’s and other homegrown talent that the Mariners always have to trade away or let escape via free agency. I also don’t like the Yankees ability to sign free agents or make a deadline trade for anybody. However, a quick scan of their postseason success lately shows that maybe it’s an outdated model for winning it all. They’ll still be a really good team (injuries killed them last year) but I don’t know that they are the best team. And The Curse of A-Rod continues….(no ALCS appearances since the historic 2004 meltdown).
Infield would have been the 14th highest payroll in 2008.
Just the three guys they’ve signed this offseason (2009 salaries) would have been more than six teams spent in 2008.
Their five most expensive players (A-Rod / Sabathia / Teix / Jeter / Burnett) will make more in 2009 than 21 teams spent in 2008.
It takes six Yankee players (the five above plus Rivera) to equal the 2008 Mariners payroll.
Their eight most expensive players (five above plus Rivera / Matsui / Damon) will make 15-16M more than the Tigers (2nd highest payroll) spent in 2008.
Simply disgusting.
The thing about them building through FA, though, is that it means they’re not gutting their farm system by building through trades.
Anyway, this isn’t all that much different than Giambi. Speaking of which, he’d make a nice DH on a short deal.
The problem, as I rant about every time this comes up, is that the Yankees and Mets own New York, and MLB’s ridiculous territorial system means their franchises are vastly more lucrative than everyone else’s. The New York area should have three, four teams (and they’d still do better than the worst franchises economically). That’s the equalizer.
I definitely don’t want to see a salary cap of any sort; I think it creates far more problems than it solves, and just shifts the ridiculous gobs of money even further towards the owners, rather than the players.
But something has to be done about the ridiculous revenue advantage that the Yankees (and as Derek says but to a somewhat lesser extent, the Mets; you could maybe make a case for the Red Sox also) have over every other team in baseball.
It’s definitely damaging the game, but I don’t think the reflex to calling for a salary cap is the right thing to do.
So where does the luxery tax that the yanks had to pay from last years payroll go to? If it goes to major league baseball somewhere, how does that motivate MLB to make a salary cap to make things more even?
Yeah, but they’re not going to be picking until the 4th round every year at this rate.
As far as I know, money paid via the luxury tax goes directly to Major League Baseball and is put into what they call “an industry growth fund.”
sounds like Oakland for 2 years, unless some other team gets worried and gives him the 3 years he is asking for…
“But something has to be done about the ridiculous revenue advantage that the Yankees (and as Derek says but to a somewhat lesser extent, the Mets; you could maybe make a case for the Red Sox also) have over every other team in baseball.”
How did the Yanks and the Mets do in the playoffs this year?
Although I am not usually a fan of the evil empire, I am glad that we will not have to face Tex for ~80 ABs this year.
Does anyone know how that all works? Advertising or what?
It’s obvious that just spending money is no guarantee of success. How many WSs have the Yanks been in since they traded for ARod? 0. Mets post-Beltran? 0.
Does anyone know how that all works? Advertising or what?
There is no guarantee of success, but if you don’t think that the dice are pretty heavily loaded in the Yankees’ favor after the signings they’ve made this offseason, I don’t know what to say to you.
I thought the luxury tax somehow was funneled to the lower revenue teams? Steinbrenner commented once that he shouldn’t have to help finance operations of the (insert name of team that escapes me).
That’s been what’s been saving baseball, the fact that the Yankees have been getting little bang for their buck. However, I see no reason to assume that trend will continue. Yes maybe they’ll have a lot of injuries and somehow underperform, or maybe they won’t and they’ll win 106 games and march into the World Series. That’s great if you love seeing a ridiculously overpowered team or live in New York, but winning by outspending everyone else isn’t going to be interesting to the other 29 fanbases.
I never said the Yankees weren’t looking loaded going into this year, just stating previous examples. This is what I had been afraid of, though. A big-market team landing 3 top free agents at the same time is scary.
The industry growth fund, and this is not directly from MLB, is reported to be used for player benefits and to promote the growth of baseball around the world
The positive I can take out of it is as far as our division is concerned, the strongest team just lost KRod and Teixeira – and has stated that they don’t want Manny.
The playoffs are a crapshoot, we have to be concerned with getting there against the Rangers/Angels/A’s – then we can worry about the Yankees.
“There is no guarantee of success, but if you don’t think that the dice are pretty heavily loaded in the Yankees’ favor after the signings they’ve made this offseason, I don’t know what to say to you.”
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.
Spoken like an ESPN writer!
from the CBA:
H. Uses Of Competitive Balance Tax Proceeds
Competitive Balance Tax proceeds collected pursuant to Section B(4) above shall be used as follows.
(1) The first $2.5 million of the proceeds (collected for any Contract Year) shall be held in reserve for the purposes described in
paragraphs (5)(b)(ii)(B), (5)(c)(ii)(C) and (5)(d)(iii) of Section E and, if the Parties agree based on experience under such Salary
attribution rules, another $2.5 million, or such other figure to which the Parties agree, of proceeds (collected for any Contract Year) shall
be held in reserve for such purposes. Any amount held in reserve pursuant to this paragraph (1), with accrued interest, shall be contributed
to the Industry Growth Fund and used for the purposes set out in Article XXV if and when the Parties agree that there is no longer any need for such reserve.
(2) Seventy-five percent (75%) of the remaining proceeds collected for each Contract Year, with accrued interest, shall be used to fund benefits to Players, as provided in the Major League Baseball Players Benefit Plan Agreements.
(3) Twenty-five percent (25%) of the remaining proceeds collected for each Contract Year shall be contributed to the Industry Growth Fund and, with accrued interest, used for the purposes set
out in Article XXV.
FWIW, “paragraphs (5)(b)(ii)(B), (5)(c)(ii)(C) and (5)(d)(iii) of Section E” deal with player options.
Complaining about the Yankess and their fans got old for me around the time I started playing in kid pitch leagues.
Just beat them on the field, or don’t talk.
The Yankees still have to worry about the playoffs themselves, of course. I don’t think either the Rays or the Red Sox were waving white flags, or had as many holes to fill this offseason as the Yankees. It’s still a tough division (though the loss of Burnett certainly weakens Toronto). And the Yankees still have a porous defense, though Texeira will help scoop out some of Jeter’s bad throws.
And no one has a clue how the new Stadium will play. That’s a lot of longterm contracts when you don’t know where your power alleys are.
“Spoken like an ESPN writer!”
Uh oh… now you’re on to my day job!
Seriously though, for every good signing those organizations make there will be a bad one to go a long with it. And While Tex is going to help the yanks a ton he’s going to have a season or two where he sucks or is hurt and they are going to be stuck with the tab.
Speaking of cheap free agents, Jamie Burke has signed a minor league deal with the M’s. Clement might be our DH after all.
Mariner fans: Not allowed to speak since 2004.
The “Igniter” in today’s New York Times:
“Unless something happens quickly with Teixeira, it is likely that López will enter January as the only Boras client to sign with a new team. Major League Baseball shuts down between Christmas and New Year’s Day, although some agents and team executives continue to negotiate. That means that the high-profile players like RamÃrez and Lowe and even the lesser-known ones like Willie Bloomquist and Ãlex Cora will remain uncertain of their 2009 destinations.”
The higher the expectations are driven in Yankeeland with all this money spent, the quicker the “fans” turn on their own overpaid players and make them want out. Alex hits better than God and still doesn’t have a ring, CC pitched like garbage in the AL last year…I think they’re gonna prove once again that the championships just can’t be bought. GO RAYS!
“Alex hits better than God and still doesn’t have a ring.”
I think His OPS last year was 1.500, which is just stupid. But He didn’t have enough ABs to qualify for anything.
Where are all the National League clubs anxious to sign Willie to a multiyear deal?
Or Jamie might be cut in spring training. That is the advantage of a minor league deal. You need a lot of catchers in spring training.
Wow, I must be old. When I played kid pitch the Yankees were in epic fail mode and no one gave a ****.
Your market-size based revenue sharing plan deals with that, though. It was brilliant. I’m appalled it hasn’t received any traction at all within the mainstream media.
You wrote that article almost 7 years ago.
Larry Stone was on KJR earlier and pointed out that even with these signings, the Yankee payroll would go down, due to their earlier appalling contracts coming off the books.
That is a humiliating factoid, spending this much money and watching their payroll actually go down. If we (the US) declared war on Haiti, spending $30B over ten years before finally securing a surrender from their government, I wouldn’t call it a victory. If I were a Yankee fan, I wouldn’t want to win with this method of roster construction anyway. If they can’t win a title after spending more in FA signings in one offseason than the entire GDP of handful of nations, they should be massively ashamed, IMO. Watching the Rays beat up on the Yanks in ‘09 is going to be a joy for me.
I would, but I still haven’t gotten myself out.
How long before Manny signs with the Yankees?
The Yankees remind me of my MLB 2K7 for XBox 360 franchise. I think my team could beat them though.
MLB needs a salary cap ASAP! The Yankees have the 4 highest paid players in baseball now, which is insane. If there was a cap the Yankees wouldn’t win a World Series for a decade because they couldn’t mortgage their farm system for vets all the time.
Ooooooooooooooh boy.
How long has it been since the Yankees have won a World Series?
The Yankees spend a bunch of money for players. Big freakin’ deal. And Teixeira is worth $20+ million anyway.
A somewhat obvious set of questions:
* How often in MLB history has the top payroll team ended up winning the WS?
* Heck, how often does the top payroll team in each division end up winning the division?
My guess is that it’s a fairly low percentage for each, and this is a classic case of going for the easy-but-irrelevant comparison (see the book, Predictably Irrational) — but does anyone have the actual data?
You know what the best part about the signings is? We, and I say that as a Yankees fan, didn’t mortgage the farm system. Last year, the fanbase clamored for Johan Santana, and we stayed out of that. Consequently, we held on to our guys; we’ve still got Cano, Austin Jackson and the pitching troika of Joba, Hughes and Kennedy. What we’ve had problems with in the past is giving away talented players, not so much with bad free agent signings. Every time we had a prospect of note in the last years of the George era, we flipped him for an over-the-hill veteran. This time, we lost draft picks, which aren’t valueless, but one of ours is protected, so we don’t come away completely empty-handed.
I hate this line of reasoning. Just because guys like Steve Phillips and Bill Bavasi can squander away an advantage doesn’t mean that the advantage isn’t real and meaningful. The Yankees and Red Sox haven’t dominated the AL East because they know something that everyone else doesn’t–they’ve dominated it because they have a boatload more money to spend than everyone else.
Teams like the Marlins can be cute and occasionally increase payroll to pick and choose which seasons they want to go all in, but obviously their fan base is not happy with that approach, even though they have more 21st century WS titles than the Yankees do. I just don’t see how it is good business for MLB to let 4-5 teams dominate the free agent market, and for the Yankees to dominate most of those teams.
The problem with a salary cap is that you’re removing some of the disadvantage cheap and bad owners have by not spending money (in that their teams aren’t competitive).
It’s potentially MORE profitable to run a franchise to be bad and cheap (basically, field a replacement-level team, and collect revenue sharing money that high-spending teams kick in + the shared pool of revenue MLB doles out from national TV, etc.) than good and expensive, depending on the market, so I think you need to fix that problem before implementing a hard salary cap.
I just don’t see how it is good business for MLB to let 4-5 teams dominate the free agent market, and for the Yankees to dominate most of those teams.
It’s sort of counterbalanced by three rounds of playoffs and some well-managed low-revenue/low-salary teams, as the last few years have shown.
The other thing is that no MLB team is anywhere near as badly managed as the 1930’s Phillies are, and you don’t have the situation you had in the 1950’s where the Kansas City A’s got to be a farm team for the Yankees, so competitive balance today is far better than it was during those times, even if it’s off the peak of the 1980’s some.
It’s sort of counterbalanced by three rounds of playoffs and some well-managed low-revenue/low-salary teams, as the last few years have shown.
I guess I don’t consider that a real counterbalance. It’s the illusion of a fair playing field rather than a legitimately level playing field. And even then, the AL playoffs are essentially Yankees/Sawks vs. The Field.
I think it’s unlikely that this situation would stop me from watching baseball, but it gets under my skin that everyone is willing to downplay this advantage just because the Yankees haven’t won a WS in a while, even if they’ve been a really good team. It’s similar to how I found it irritating that people wouldn’t acknowledge that Beane’s A’s had a really freaking awesome run even though they didn’t win a WS.
Have I mentioned how much it annoys me when people get all ‘Well, the Red Sox are just like the Yankees blah blah it’s Yanks/Sox vs everybody else blah’. It’s stupid and it’s lazy.
You know where Boston’s payroll was in 2008? 4th. Behind not just the Yankees (200 mil vs 133 mil, but what’s half again as much compared to the opportunity to hate on Boston?), but behind the Mets and the Tigers as well, and within spitting distance of the five teams under them (including the Mariners at 117 mil) Ask them Detroit or Seattle that worked out for them.
Boston is a big-market team with a big-market payroll. But please spare me this ‘Boston and New York aren’t like the other rich teams’. There’s the Yankees and then there’s everybody else.
If you want to hate Boston, that’s fine, it’s baseball, everybody’s got to hate somebody. But hate them because their fans are assholes or you hate New England accents or Dustin Pedroia makes you want to shoot a midget; get a real reason.
The problem with the Yankees isn’t the Texeira contract; there’s a bunch of teams in baseball that could support that contract if they felt like it and the circumstances were right. It’s the Texeira contract and the Sabathia contract and the Burnett contract all in the same goddamn year; this while they’re already supporting retarded-when-signed contracts like Matsui’s and Damon’s and the not-retarded-but-retardedly-huge Rodriguez contract. I don’t have a problem with a team paying 20 mil a year for a superstar. I have a problem with the Yankees saying, ‘Screw it,’ and signing every superstar.
well, since lots of people don’t like the idea of manipulating what is a semi free-market with regard to payrolls, why not implement a system that is ties into it? I propose a system where deviation from the mean can be penalized in a pregressive manner. For example, if we find the average payroll for a given year, call it $100 million (just pulling numbers out of my ass to simplify the math in the argument), any team that is 20-30% above that would have to pay a penalty equivalent to 20% of their payroll. Any team that is 30-40% above that would be penalized 40%, 40-50% it becomes 80%. Again, these #’s are just onces I pulled out of the air for the sake of framing the concept.
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.
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:
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”).
DMZ:
Force the Dodgers and the Giants back to NY, that’ll do the trick.
I don’t know, when NY and Boston are playing in and winning every WS I’ll start to worry. As it is, over the past 9 seasons (going back to the last time the Yankees won in 2000), only three teams have shown up more than once in the WS (Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals) and only Boston has won twice. So 18 slots and 14 different teams. That’s better parity than baseball saw in the 90s, when Atlanta took 5, the Yankees 3, and Cleveland and Toronto each took 2 — only 10 teams out of 18
available slots (none in 1994).
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.
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.
Since I’m bored, and, since I’ve got nothing to do while I wait for my flight to head back home for Christmas, and since people have asked, here’s data…
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)
dcmarinerfan: First, thanks for the work. So I’d say (in my own subjective way), that while pay is coupled to performance, it’s only loosely so. I find it interesting that in your ten-year sample, average and median payroll rank is fairly close. (when billg and I walk in to a bar, net worth isn’t
)
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.
It sure is nice to have a team to hate as much as this makes me hate the Yankees. Even if the M’s aren’t worth watching, there’s always another game going on where my rooting interest is strong…
Headline:
Tampa and Philly qualify for World Series: MLB Shuts Down all Operations
fwiw, the NYT thinks even the Yanks may cut payroll by trading Matsui or Swisher …