RealGM

How can we figure out which teams get the highest marginal benefit from each extra dollar their owners shell out? To try and find an answer, I ran the correlations between each team’s Opening Day payrolls (h/t: USA Today‘s salary database) and win totals since 2001. I chose the last 10 years because it was long enough for almost every team to have experienced both rises and declines, but also recent enough that most clubs’ front offices haven’t changed much.

Below are the results (click for a bigger view). Correlations are scored from -1 to 1. A high positive number means a very strong relationship between payroll and wins, a negative number meaning the team did worse as its budget went up, and 0 meaning the two variables are completely unrelated. For some perspective, I’ve included how many standard deviations (a relative measure of how much a score differs from the average) each team’s correlation is from the mean (μ = .033, σ = .407).

Lots of talk about the importance of money here so I posted. Studies are showing that money is becoming less important because of the rise of things like Sabermetrics. This guy has done a few studies on it. Still, you need money to keep your players.

http://www.wahooblues.com/2011/04/19/mo ... -mlb.html/

Pretty impressive considering a boat load of the money from the last 10 years have gone to Vernon Wells, BJ Ryan, AJ Burnett and Frank Thomas inflated contracts.

Yeah, Ricciardi was a pretty good GM.

You have to factor the creative accounting that Ricciardi's contracts generally included. For example, in 2008-2010, Vernon Wells was making $500,000, $1.5M, and $12.5M respectively. Except of course he was getting signing bonuses of $8.5M in each of those three seasons (totaling $25.5M). Burnett made $1M in 2006, but had a $6M signing bonus. Frank Thomas made $1 million in 2007, but had a $9.12M signing bonus. Are those factored into the payroll figures or just the salaries minus the bonus? Rogers had to pay that too, whether they were hidden from the payroll figures or not. The link the author provides shows the Jays payroll at $62M in 2010, which indicates to me that Ryan's contract and the money sent to Philly in the Halladay trade was not included in the figures (that's about $16+ million alone). In other words, just looking at what the players on the field make does not accurately depict how much the team is spending. In all cases, not just the Jays.

To suggest the Jays were prudent with money over the past 10 years is completely asinine, IMO.

The point is that the Jays were an above average team over that period despite having average-to-below average payrolls. It's nothing that anybody here didn't know before.

Michael Bradley wrote:You have to factor the creative accounting that Ricciardi's contracts generally included. For example, in 2008-2010, Vernon Wells was making $500,000, $1.5M, and $12.5M respectively. Except of course he was getting signing bonuses of $8.5M in each of those three seasons (totaling $25.5M). Burnett made $1M in 2006, but had a $6M signing bonus. Frank Thomas made $1 million in 2007, but had a $9.12M signing bonus. Are those factored into the payroll figures or just the salaries minus the bonus? Rogers had to pay that too, whether they were hidden from the payroll figures or not. The link the author provides shows the Jays payroll at $62M in 2010, which indicates to me that Ryan's contract and the money sent to Philly in the Halladay trade was not included in the figures (that's about $16+ million alone). In other words, just looking at what the players on the field make does not accurately depict how much the team is spending. In all cases, not just the Jays.

To suggest the Jays were prudent with money over the past 10 years is completely asinine, IMO.

If that stuff was included, it might actually push Toronto further up the list. The teams are ranked by the correlation between payroll and win total in each given year, not by an averaged dollars-to-wins metric...if the jump in payroll commitments in 2006 which coincided with our 86 win season were somehow included, or the 2010 Ryan/Doc cash attached to a year where we won 85, it'd likely show greater correlation.

You're partially right in the grand scheme, though. Because of the way teams structure contracts there's often some lag or fudging, which makes it difficult to fit a curve in the manner he's attempting.

Some more studies on payroll efficiency
http://www.wired.com/playbook/2010/02/w ... ith-least/
http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2009/1 ... per-win-pa
http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2009/1 ... per-win-an
http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/20 ... payrol.php