2023 Is The Year Of The Worst Baseball Teams That Money Can Buy
This season shows how easily expensive rosters can become disasters. Looking at you, Mets, Padres, Yankees, Angels and Cardinals.
Anything with diamonds costs a lot, but it turns out that all the money in the world can’t necessarily buy baseball happiness. Since 1994, there has never been less of a correlation between team spending and wins than in 2023.
Fans and insiders alike have long known that dollars spent on talent don’t automatically lead to team success. Bungling front offices can turn huge stacks of money into even larger piles of losses, while shrewd front offices can win more than expected with lower payrolls.
But some examples from this season truly underscore just how easy it is for an expensive roster to turn into a total disaster.
Let’s focus on the biggest of such failures, teams with sub-.500 records (through Monday’s games) and huge payrolls — the St. Louis Cardinals, New York Mets, Los Angeles Angels, San Diego Padres and New York Yankees.
For each of these massively disappointing clubs, we’ll dig into where it all went wrong, and how they ended up building the worst teams that money can buy.
St. Louis Cardinals
Opening Day payroll: $175.6 million (15th)
Current payroll: $183.3 million (11th)
Winning percentage: .438 (26th)
After a strong 2022 season under new manager Oliver Marmol, the Cardinals seemed to have a roadmap to continued success — right down to a seamless succession plan from future Hall of Famer Yadi Molina to new arrival Willson Contreras at catcher. But almost all of St. Louis’ returning players have underperformed, with Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado each losing more than 3.5 Wins Above Replacement from their 2022 totals and a rotation that had been solid a year ago turning into one of MLB’s worst. (Adam Wainwright’s 8.19 ERA is the eighth-highest ever in a season by a pitcher with as many innings as he’s thrown.) Although Contreras has felt like a scapegoat for the Cardinals’ overall struggles, it is also true that he’s a 31-year-old catcher with below-average defensive metrics who has to DH every fourth game and is set to make $72.5 million over the next four seasons. This Cardinals season is proof that even the best-run franchises with seemingly logical plans can have a season where everything goes haywire.
More For Your Money Fun Fact: This will be only the second losing season in St. Louis since the start of the 2000s. (The other came in 2007, when the defending World Series champion Cards went 78-84.)
New York Mets
Opening Day payroll: $353.5 million (1st)
Current payroll: $215.4 million (8th)
Winning percentage: .455 (24th)
Nobody should be surprised to see the Mets on a list like this given the franchise’s history. The 2023 Mets fell flat from nearly the beginning. It has been train-wreck gripping to see how thoroughly New York’s strengths from last season — when it won 101 games and spent much of the season in first place (before being passed late by the Atlanta Braves) — deteriorated despite the team spending the second most in free agency.
That’s true on the aggregate level — they’ve fallen from No. 2 in batting average, No. 5 in scoring, No. 1 in K/BB ratio and No. 4 in fewest runs allowed to 26th, 20th, 25th and 18th — and the individual level, where nearly all of the best returning Mets are putting up fewer WAR this year than in 2022. (The only exception is, ironically, the team’s highest-paid player, Francisco Lindor.) New York did salvage some future potential from the season by conducting an epic trade-deadline fire sale, so not everything was a total loss, but “wait till next year” was never supposed to be this season’s mantra in Queens.
More For Your Money Fun Fact: By missing the playoffs this season, the Mets still will only have one pair of back-to-back postseason berths (2015-16) since making the NLCS and World Series in 1999-2000.
Los Angeles Angels
Opening Day payroll: $212.2 million (6th)
Current payroll: $234.5 million (6th)
Winning percentage: .469 (19th)
Even relative to other snakebit franchises, the Angels stand out as especially cursed. How else to explain the fact that Los Angeles squandered Shohei Ohtani’s best two-way season yet, then failed to get anything for him at the trade deadline, only to watch him get injured and not be able to pitch (or, recently, even hit) as the Angels’ playoff odds fell into oblivion?
Sam Miller rightly pointed out that Ohtani and Mike Trout have seldom overlapped while healthy and playing like all-time greats, so the notion of L.A. wasting two future inner-circle HOFers is perhaps a bit overstated. But the general theme of this team falling well short of its potential remains stubbornly true. The names of the supporting cast change (is it Josh Hamilton or Anthony Rendon? Tyler Anderson or C.J. Wilson?), yet the problems are almost always the same: In the nine seasons since their last playoff appearance in 2014, the Angels have finished among the bottom half of MLB in scoring six times and in run prevention six times. Between the two categories, they’ve been below-average at one or the other every single season in that span. A team that consistently throws most of its money at below-average players will not win games, regardless of its top-end talent.
More For Your Money Fun Fact: Shohei Ohtani was 15 years old the last time the Angels won a playoff game.
San Diego Padres
Opening Day payroll: $249.0 million (3rd)
Current payroll: $236.3 million (5th)
Winning percentage: .469 (19th)
The Padres might be the most frustrating team on this list, because they clearly have the potential to be far better. As we noted in early August, San Diego looks like a playoff-caliber team on paper: It ranks 12th in run differential per game and 10th in total WAR. But a 6-22 record in 1-run games has left the Padres nearly 10 games below .500 heading into the regular season’s final three weeks. Not that things would be perfect even if we adjust for the team’s string of close losses. Fresh off a huge contract extension, Manny Machado did not come close to replicating his 2022 stats, nor did Jake Cronenworth or Yu Darvish (both of whom are now injured). With some exceptions, such as Fernando Tatis Jr., it seems like the only guys playing well are the ones who could soon leave — Blake Snell and Josh Hader are due to be free agents after 2023, and Juan Soto has one more arbitration year before hitting the market as well. After spending nearly $900 million last offseason alone, San Diego may end up being the ultimate cautionary tale for teams that double- and triple-down on costly moves because they feel they have no choice but to keep their championship window pried open with stacks of cash.
More For Your Money Fun Fact: As recently as Aug. 31, the two teams from last year’s blockbuster Soto trade — the contending Padres and rebuilding Washington Nationals — had the exact same record, 62-73 (hat tip to The Messenger’s Javon Edmonds for this one).
New York Yankees
Opening Day payroll: $277.0 million (2nd)
Current payroll: $259.4 million (1st)
Winning percentage: .497 (18th)
There are many reasons why the 2023 Yankees saw their season slide into the abyss, from the prolonged injury absence of defending AL MVP Aaron Judge — without whom New York cannot function offensively — to a deeply ineffective starting rotation (with the lone exceptions of Gerrit Cole and that one night Domingo Germán was perfect).
In part because it cost so much to re-sign Judge, and in part because of luxury tax concerns, the Yankees made few additional offseason moves heading into 2023. The only other significant bet they made, signing pitcher Carlos Rodón to a six-year, $162 million contract, has backfired horribly, with Rodón missing the entire first half of the season and compiling a 6.60 ERA in 10 starts after his return. And the crew New York chose to run back from its 99-win roster of a year ago has regressed badly; among 2022 playoff teams, only the Mets have produced fewer WAR out of their returning players than the Yankees this season. Like many of the other teams on this list, the Yankees had an older core of expensive stars who had been successful and, it was assumed, would remain so this year — an assumption that proved to be very flawed.
More For Your Money Fun Fact: The Yankees are flirting with a last-place finish in the AL East. The last time the Yankees finished in the basement, in 1990, shortstop Anthony Volpe was 11 years . . . away from being born, and September call-up center fielder Jasson Dominguez was 13 years away from being born.
Filed under: Baseball