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9:51:00 PM EDT
Baseball payrolls rear their ugly heads
On the theme of questionable assessments of sports and
business, I’ve been meaning to commenting on an article in the New York Times
last week by Murray Chass. There’s been quite a lot of discussion about what
appears a shift in the balance of power between the American League and
National league. As Chass points out, seven of the last ten world series
winners come from the AL,
the junior circuit has won eight all-star games in a row and there’s a
perception that the better baseball is being played in there.
Desperate to join the Yankees and the Red Sox in the A.L. East race, the Blue Jays inflated their payroll to $72.9 million this year from $45.4 million last year. Their 2006 payroll is not one of the largest, but the 61 percent increase is easily the largest. Then there are the World Series champion Chicago White Sox, who fattened their payroll by $25 million.
Over all, 11 of 14 A.L. payrolls went up this year, but only 9 of 16 N.L. payrolls did the same, according to figures compiled by the commissioner's office. Only two A.L. payrolls but six N.L. payrolls went down.”
Chass conceded that payroll wasn’t the only factor. He noted the front office management on small budget teams like Oakland, for example. And, maybe I’m just sensitive to these sorts of arguments because of the endless misinformation around what were said to be the payroll-driven competitive balance problems prior to 2002. But, Chass’ analysis is still misleading. Chass notes that four of the five top payroll teams are in the American league. Actually, according to ESPN.com’s payroll data, AL teams own the top four payrolls in baseball – the Yankees, Red Sox, Angels and White Sox. But, the next six teams are all in the NL, and the Mets and Dodgers are within a couple million of the Angels. Looking further at the list, three of the biggest surprises in baseball this year, the Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies and Cincinnati Reds are all in thebottom nine in payroll for all of major league baseball. All, of course, are national league teams. Furthermore, the teams with the best records in their respective leagues, the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals, are both mid-level teams, the Tigers at No. 13 and the Cardinals at No. 14 in total payroll. Furthermore, the Angels, with the number three payroll, have the worst record in the AL among all teams with a legitimate major league roster.
What’s the point of all this? In baseball, there is a reflexive tendency to read money and payroll into almost any discussion of competitiveness. As a result, data is deployed in a highly selective way to “prove” that payroll drives all in baseball. This reflex reached comic extremes in Andrew Zimbalist’s 2003 book, May the Best Team Win. In that book, Zimbalist argued that the relationship between payroll and winning was statistically inconclusive, and pointed out that there was as much likelihood that winning drove payroll as vice versa. This year’s White Sox, who increased their payroll by $25 million over last year, are a good example. But, notwithstanding Zimbalist’s clear analysis, Bob Costas managed, in his introduction, to write that Zimbalist proved that baseball had a huge competitive balance problem because of the unfair distribution of revenues in the sport. King Kaufman has shown that, in fact, baseball’s competitive balance problems are largely a function of the smaller number of teams that make the playoffs compared to other sports and, in any event, aren’t as bad as the NBA’s, which escapes scrutiny on this score. None of these realities stopped Costas from misreading the book whose introduction he was writing, in order to assert a proposition that he was going to stand on come hell or high water.
Costas is a smart guy. So is Chass. This is a story that even smart guys can’t seem to avoid over-simplifying.
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Hmm. Misleading is one thing, wrong is another. Was Costas wrong that baseball has a competitive balance problem? While it makes sense that money is not the only salient predictive variable in winning, it stretches the imagination to argue that it's not a part of the story here. The fact that we have teams like the Mets-- who spend a lot and get little in return-- and the As- who do the reverse- doesn't imply that teams like the Yanks and Red Sox don't have a serious competitive advantage.
5/28/06 2:22 PM