A Dodgers-Yankees World Series Doesn't Prove Money Buys Championships
At least, not any more in 2024 than any other year.
This year’s World Series battle between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers is one that baseball has been waiting more than four decades for. Despite being the sport’s two glamour franchises, in its two largest media markets, the Dodgers and Yankees have consistently found a way to avoid each other in October — even when things seemed lined up in their favor.
But 2024 is different, and the powers-that-be are already salivating over the potential TV ratings. NYC versus L.A.? Shohei Ohtani versus Aaron Judge? Mookie Betts versus Juan Soto? Gerrit Cole versus Yoshinobu Yamamoto? The sheer collision of big-city star power is staggering.
Of course, fans of teams in smaller markets were already not thrilled with this year’s postseason. Aside from the Cleveland Guardians, who ranked third-to-last in payroll, the other members of MLB’s Final Four were all among the Top 4 in roster expenses. And the average payroll percentile for the Dodgers and Yankees — 94.8 percent — is the highest for any World Series matchup since the 1994 strike:
Ohtani and Betts alone make more in average annual contract value than 15 MLB teams’ entire rosters. So in that context, it’s easy to see this matchup as an example of money just buying championships — the scourge of late capitalism ruining our baseball, etc, etc.
But the surprising truth is that salary was less correlated with success this year than in the average season since the strike. That’s whether we use winning percentage or Wins Above Replacement, raw numbers or the percentile approach from above.
For instance, in the average season since the strike, the correlation coefficient between payroll and winning percentage is 0.44. For 2024, that figure is just 0.36. For every high-priced success story like the Yankees and Dodgers, there were also expensive sub-.500 flops like the Rangers, Giants and Blue Jays. Meanwhile, teams like the Guardians, Orioles, Brewers, Royals and Tigers ranked 20th or worse in spending but made the playoffs with strong campaigns. (The Seattle Mariners also had the WAR of a playoff team despite ranking 20th in payroll.)
Ironically, a team’s WAR was basically just as correlated with its payroll last year as it was this year, but the Diamondbacks upsetting the Phillies — and the Rangers’ copious injuries — insulated the 2023 postseason against as many accusations of store-bought World Series berths. If anything, the story of the past few postseasons has been how difficult a time top seeds had, and whether MLB’s expanded playoff format introduced too much randomness into the sport.
The perennial crapshoot that is the playoffs generally serves to thwart World Series matchups like this Yankees-Dodgers showdown. Again looking back since 1995, there’s very little relationship between how predictive payroll was toward wins during the regular season and how high-priced a World Series we ended up getting:
(And remember, most of those historical seasons took place before the playoffs expanded to their current form, presumably making it even more difficult to translate regular-season success to a deep postseason run.)
This year, though, the baseball gods smiled upon Rob Manfred and the executives at FOX — or maybe the baseball devil is punishing fans of the other 28 teams who can’t afford players like Soto and Ohtani.
Still, consider the following: Amidst haphazard waves of winners in a previous era, the mantra for statheads compulsively seeking order was simply to relax and “embrace the randomness”. That’s because the World Series winner was very seldom the true best team in any given season.
In 2024, however, we might actually see an alignment between the champion and the best team — and, yes, an obscenely expensive one, too.
But just because MLB’s great October randomizer finally landed on a combination that feels predetermined by the TV networks doesn’t mean that baseball success is suddenly able to be bought and paid for. We might just have to take a deep breath and embrace the lack of chaos this time… while we wait for the usual randomness to return next Fall.
Filed under: Baseball