Major League Baseball · 2011 to 2025 · 450 team seasons

What money actually buys in baseball

Every team's payroll, record, and postseason result for fifteen completed seasons, put side by side. The question underneath: how much of winning is purchased, and how much is everything else?

Does a bigger payroll buy more wins?

Each dot is one team in one season. Left to right is payroll compared with that season's league average, so 100 means average spending and 200 means double. Bottom to top is regular season winning percentage. The curve is the best fit through all 450 dots. Comparing each team to its own season's average keeps 2011 dollars and 2025 dollars on the same footing.

Missed the playoffs Made the playoffs Won the World Series Best fit

The ladder: spending tier by tier

Teams sorted into five groups by where their payroll ranked inside their own season, then followed all the way to a title. Each bar is the share of team seasons in that group that got at least that far.

Read it this way

    Once you are already in the tournament

    Limited to the 162 teams that actually made the playoffs. If money mostly buys a ticket to October, the gaps here should shrink. They narrow, but they do not close.

    What did the winners cost?

    Where each World Series champion's payroll ranked among the 30 teams that season. Rank 1 is the biggest spender in baseball, rank 30 the smallest.

    The spending gap is getting wider

    Three views of the same trend. Average payroll keeps climbing, the distance between the top and bottom of the league is stretching, and the concentration measure is drifting up. Note that 2020 was a 60 game season, so salaries were prorated to roughly a third of normal. The shape of the distribution still holds.

    Average payroll per team

    Top spender vs bottom spender

    How concentrated the money is

    Payroll and wins are more closely linked than they used to be

    Fifteen year franchise scoreboard

    Everything each club spent from 2011 through 2025 and everything it got back. Wins above payroll is the one worth studying: it counts how many wins a team banked beyond what its spending predicted, added up over fifteen seasons. Positive means the front office beat its budget. Click any column to sort.

    Spend per win divides fifteen years of payroll by fifteen years of regular season wins. It is not adjusted for inflation, so it reads low for teams that were good early and expensive late.

    The best and worst money ever spent

    Single seasons ranked by wins above payroll, the gap between a team's actual record and what its spending predicted, scaled to a 162 game season.

    Best value seasons

    Worst value seasons

    Two other ways to look at the bill

    What a title cost the clubs that won one

    Total payroll 2011 to 2025 divided by championships won in that window.

    Biggest spenders still waiting

    Fifteen years of payroll with no championship to show for it.

    Where the numbers come from

    • Payroll: Spotrac end of season total team payroll, 2011 through 2025. This counts what a club actually paid out across the season, including money retained on traded players and salaries of players on the injured list.
    • Records, standings, and every postseason result: the official MLB Stats API (statsapi.mlb.com). Champions were derived from actual World Series game results, not entered by hand, and all fifteen match the record book.
    • Payroll index compares a team to the average payroll in its own season, so inflation does not distort cross year comparisons. An index of 150 means the club spent half again what the average club spent that year.
    • Wins above payroll comes from fitting winning percentage to the natural log of payroll index across all 450 team seasons, then measuring each team's distance from that curve in wins per 162 games.
    • 2020 was shortened to 60 games and salaries were prorated. Winning percentage and the payroll index stay comparable; raw dollar figures for 2020 do not.
    • Playoff structure changed twice in this window: a one game wild card from 2012, a sixteen team field in 2020 only, and the current twelve team bracket from 2022. Reaching a given round was not equally hard in every year.