As we enter a new baseball season, I’d like to talk about money. Baseball fans always complain about the rich teams spending money and winning all the time. They’ve argued for decades that financial imbalances make the game worse. In the strongest version of these arguments, they claim outright that a team can buy the World Series.
Can they, though? Can a team buy the World Series, or is this just hyperbole? ESPN recently wrote about it with regard to the Mets.
Let’s figure it out.
Does the biggest spender win the World Series?
Here’s a way to start. We can take a look at which team spends the most money each year, and then we can see whether they won the World Series that year. It’s a crude method (others have done more), but one way to gain insights. I ran the numbers using payroll data, and here’s what I found over the last 25 years:
In short, it happens a lot less often than readers might think. Only 4 times in the last 25 years. And 3 of those 4 times (the 1999, 2000, and 2009 New York Yankees) were well over a decade ago. In the last decade, the 2018 Boston Red Sox were the only biggest spending team that won the World Series.
Furthermore, it’s not like the second or third biggest spender wins the World Series every year, either. The 2022 Houston Astros clocked in at 11th place in spending. The 2021 Atlanta Braves were 13th. And the 2017 Houston Astros and 2016 Chicago Cubs came in even lower in the spending charts (18th and 14th, respectively).
So, whatever relationship that exists between money and winning the World Series isn’t too direct. And, as a bonus, baseball fans might want to brush up on which team spends the most money. Most think it’s the Yankees. While this was true for the first decade of the 2000s, it’s actually been the Dodgers for most of the last decade.
Does the best team win the World Series?
Let’s ask this second question. Even if the team that spends the most money fails to win the World Series, does the best team beat them? If not, that could change the issue for us a bit.
Readers might have gathered that I also ran the numbers on this one. And, of course, I did. I looked up the team with the best record in each of the last 25 seasons, and then I compared that to the team that won the World Series in that season. Here’s what we’ve got:
OK, so this happens more often. 7 times in the last 25 years. And even when the best team doesn’t win the World Series, it often makes a deep postseason run.
But this still means that in 18 out of 25 seasons, the best team didn’t win it all! That should tell us some things both about whether a team can buy the World Series and what it takes to win the Series in the first place.
Can you buy the World Series?
First of all, no, a team can’t buy the World Series. Perhaps we could do more in-depth analysis of spending shortly before the trade deadline. But I don’t think that would change the basic point here.
Winning the World Series requires many things, with spending accounting for only a portion of it. Maybe not even all that large a portion. Winning requires teamwork and ultimately a fair bit of luck. Any baseball team can hit a hot streak or a bad stretch at any team. And any playoff team can get hot at the right time and win a dozen or so games. There are many, many ways for even a big spending team that has the best record in the majors to lose 4 out of 7 games (or 3 out of 5 in an earlier round!).
Here’s what a team can buy: a roster of good players who put together a winning regular season record and position their team to compete for a World Series. But they can’t buy the World Series itself.
There’s a lot more to baseball than money.
