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/
