Baseball’s Biggest Spenders Couldn’t Buy Tickets to October

On Saturday night at T-Mobile Park, shortly after the Texas Rangers eliminated the Seattle Mariners from postseason contention, defeated catcher Cal Raleigh stood in a silent, sparsely populated clubhouse and took a big dump on Seattle’s spending. Raleigh acknowledged the players’ part in squandering what was, until an 11–17 September, a near-90-percent chance of making the playoffs. But he also called out ownership and the front office for failing to reinforce the Mariners roster.

“You look over at the other locker room right there, and they’ve added more [in free agency] than anybody else, and you saw where it got them this year,” Raleigh said, referring to the victorious division-rival Rangers, who clinched a playoff appearance with the win. The catcher continued, “We have to do that to keep up. We’ve done a great job of growing some players here within the farm system, but sometimes you’ve got to go out and you have to buy. And that’s just the name of the game.”

Raleigh later walked back his comments, but he was right: A more active winter or summer might have made the difference for the Mariners. After ending their 21-year playoff drought last season (thanks to a Raleigh home run), the M’s made minor offseason additions, spending the second least of any team in the lead-up to Opening Day, upping their FanGraphs-reported MLB payroll rank from just 22nd to 18th, and then dealing closer Paul Sewald to the Diamondbacks at the deadline. The Rangers, by contrast, followed up their record late-2021 spending spree by acquiring most of a starting rotation last offseason, which they then augmented at midseason with Max Scherzer and Jordan Montgomery. (They also added a closer in Aroldis Chapman, though the pitcher they gave up to get him, Cole Ragans, was one of baseball’s best arms after his Royals debut.) One of these AL West teams skimped and struck out; the other splurged and succeeded. The lesson seems clear.

If you’re going to make the case for spending as the name of the game in MLB, though, 2023 isn’t the best year to use as an example. If anything, this season was defined by high-profile, high-payroll flops. The three biggest-spending teams—the Mets, Yankees, and Padres—all missed the playoffs, as did the Angels, who also ran a top-10 payroll in their (probably) final fruitless attempt to win with both Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani. The Cubs, who placed fifth in offseason spending, suffered a Seattle-esque late elimination on Saturday, when they lost to the playoff-bound (and perennially parsimonious) Marlins. Even the Rangers ultimately lost the first-place position they held for most of the season, settling for the second wild card and edging out the M’s by just two games (plus the season-series tiebreaker). The Phillies, Dodgers, Blue Jays, Rangers, Braves, and Astros all topped $200 million in payroll, per FanGraphs, but the other six of the 12 clubs that enter postseason play this week ranked among the bottom 14 teams.

In July, I observed that the league was on track for an anomalously tenuous connection between spending and winning. Through the teams’ first 81 games, the correlation between payroll rank and winning percentage rank—where minus-1 would indicate a perfect inverse correlation and 1 would indicate a perfect positive correlation, in which winning precisely mirrored spending—was 0.132, a nearly nonexistent relationship. I noted then that “the relationship between a team’s payroll rank and winning percentage in the first half has little bearing on the relationship between its payroll rank and winning percentage in the second half,” which suggested that “the fact that the first half was wonky doesn’t mean the second half will be wonky too.”

Well, it was wonky. When the dust settled on Sunday, the full-season correlation stood at 0.112, a slight drop compared with what it was at midseason. (Typically, it’s close to 0.4.) If we simply look at the relationship between gross payroll and winning percentage, disregarding ranks, the picture becomes even clearer, and the correlation even lower (0.079). As the graph below shows, to find a lower-correlation year, you have to go back three decades, to 1992, when the deep-pocketed Blue Jays won the World Series but the rest of the top four teams by payroll—the “Worst Team Money Could Buy” Mets, the Dodgers, and the Red Sox—finished fifth, sixth, and seventh in their divisions, respectively, and the high-ranking Yankees and Angels also scuffled. The only other lower-correlation year in the sample (which extends to the dawn of free agency in 1976) is 1990, when—as I mentioned in July—the standings went topsy-turvy, providing a columnist’s preseason question about buying championships with an October answer: not that year. Baseball’s biggest spenders, the Royals (yeah), had a losing season, as did the Angels and Yankees. The lowest-spending club, the White Sox, had the game’s third-best record, and the tightfisted Reds beat the low-payroll Pirates to earn a World Series matchup with the A’s, whom Cincinnati swept.

Payroll’s power to predict teams’ fortunes has ebbed and flowed over the past several decades. In the early years of free agency, when payrolls skyrocketed, the first movers that were willing to wade into the new market were rewarded with wins. That advantage wore off over the following decade, and the correlation between spending and winning faded further in the mid-1980s, when owners conspired to stop spending. In the late 1990s, big spenders dominated, which inspired panic about baseball economics and led to increased revenue sharing. Over the past dozen or so years, the connection between payroll and winning has tended to be weak (perhaps in part because embracing sabermetrics and data-driven development has helped some clubs ball on a budget), but from year to year, the correlations are still subject to sizable swings. Just last season, the link between spending and winning was abnormally robust.

Although some have suggested that the new rules’ impact on base stealing may have leveled the league’s playing field and boosted teams like the Orioles, Diamondbacks, and Reds at the expense of older, pricier rosters, the correlation between stolen-base value and winning was even lower than the correlation between spending and winning. One somewhat more persuasive reason some teams didn’t get the usual bang for their buck this season despite growing payroll disparities was a fairly low return on a record investment in free agents. The charts below, which date back to 1991, show the combined Baseball-Reference WAR produced by the top 25 free agents of the preceding offseason (by total contract size), plotted against the cumulative dollars committed to them (adjusted for inflation in MLB spending). The GIF alternates between versions with and without international free agents. Both samples exclude the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and extrapolate the WAR paces for free agents in the strike-shortened 1994 and 1995 seasons over 162 games. This year’s dots are red.

Even with strong finishes by signees who had missed time or slumped early on, including Trea Turner, Xander Bogaerts, Chris Bassitt, and Aaron Judge, this year’s top 25 free agents produced 42.4 bWAR without international free agents and 44.8 bWAR with them, both below the 32-season averages of 47.0 and 48.0, respectively. That’s especially underwhelming considering the unprecedented sum of nearly $3 billion that those free agents commanded during a winter of lucrative, long-term deals.

Edwin Díaz, who signed a record contract for a reliever on the day free agency opened, sustained a season-ending injury in the World Baseball Classic. Would-be Rangers ace Jacob deGrom made only six starts (all Rangers wins!) before tearing his ulnar collateral ligament. Carlos Correa, who agreed to terms with the Giants and Mets last winter before winding up back with the Twins, had his worst season ever as he played through plantar fasciitis. Carlos Rodón’s first year in New York was an injury-delayed disaster, and Andrew Benintendi, Jameson Taillon, José Abreu, Mitch Haniger, Anthony Rizzo, Tyler Anderson, and Rafael Montero each failed to top half a win above replacement level.

Although a few free agents may have made the difference between making and missing the playoffs—Bassitt for Toronto, Nathan Eovaldi and deGrom for Texas, Turner and Taijuan Walker for Philadelphia—only eight of the top 25 signed with teams that qualified for the postseason. (Justin Verlander signed with the Mets but was traded to the playoff-bound Astros, and Josh Bell departed Cleveland to bolster Miami’s middling lineup.) The Padres believed Bogaerts would put them over the top; the Yankees thought re-signing Judge and Rizzo and adding Rodón would help them repeat as AL East champions; the Mets expected that re-signing Díaz and Brandon Nimmo, replacing deGrom with Verlander, and signing Kodai Senga would deliver a second consecutive winning season; the Cubs wanted Dansby Swanson and Taillon to hasten the end of their rebuild; the Giants hoped Haniger and Michael Conforto would give them the thump they’d sought from Judge and Correa; the White Sox—well, who knows what the White Sox were thinking about Benintendi. But the best-laid plans of baseball teams often go awry.

In some cases, injuries are clear culprits. According to Baseball Prospectus, the Yankees lost by far the most value of any team to players on the injured list; they also spent the most money on injured players. The Angels were second in the latter category and trailed only the always-deep Dodgers in games and days missed. The Mets always carried collapse risk because of their vaunted but mostly middle-aged rotation; that unit, projected to be baseball’s second best, was worse than only three bottom dwellers’ rotations (the Royals’, Rockies’, and Athletics’) from Opening Day through the day before Steve Cohen and Billy Eppler pulled the plug and traded Scherzer. The Diamondbacks, Orioles, Jays, and Phillies, meanwhile, were among the sport’s healthiest teams.

If you want to win baseball games, it helps to be healthy. Granted, if you want to be healthy, it helps to be young. Injuries sometimes stem from (and expose) problems with roster construction, usage, or training, any or all of which could apply to the Yankees, Mets, and Angels—though, to paraphrase Freud (maybe), sometimes a torn UCL is just a torn UCL. Even constant contenders like the Yankees and Cardinals have occasional off years; this year, they each happened to have one at the same time. (For the Yankees, of course, the worst-case outcome is 82 wins. Please pray for Yankees fans at this difficult time.)

Speaking of 82-win teams: The Padres deserve a separate postmortem. Most of the teams that significantly undershot their projections—the White Sox, Cardinals, Mets, Angels, and Yankees—actually played poorly. It may be a bit of a mystery why their players didn’t do better, but given those performances, it’s easy to see why their records weren’t better. The Padres are a different, even more confounding case: In most respects, they played like a playoff team, but in the end they weren’t one.

The Padres won 20 of their last 27 games to finish a hair above .500, at 82-80. Even so, they finished 10 games below their expected record of 92-70, derived from the fact that they outscored their opponents by 104 runs (the third-highest run differential in the NL, behind the Braves and Dodgers). That’s the 29th-largest gap between expected and actual wins of any AL or NL team ever, and the eighth largest among teams that finished at least .500.

The Padres’ struggles get stranger. If you just scanned the squad’s stat lines, you’d think San Diego must have had a stellar season. Blake Snell will likely win the NL Cy Young Award, and four other Padres (Ha-Seong Kim, Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Bogaerts) joined him in posting 4-plus bWAR. In AL/NL history, 332 teams have boasted five or more players worth 4-plus batting or pitching WAR. Collectively, those teams have amassed a .596 winning percentage. The Padres are one of only 16 such teams to finish at .506 or below.

We can place the Padres in an even smaller club than that star-studded, not-so-sweet 16. They also joined an even more exclusive list of 171 AL/NL teams with four or more players who amassed 5 or more WAR. Those teams collectively won at a .594 clip. The Padres are the fifth to finish at .506 or below.

How can a team outscore its opponents by such a wide margin and still languish under .500 from early May until the last weekend of the regular season? Easy: It can have truly terrible timing.

Actually, it isn’t easy for any team that’s trying to win—as the Padres appeared to be!—to scatter its runs so suboptimally. It’s incredibly hard. It’s ironic that the Padres won their 162nd game by a one-run margin in the 11th inning because they spent most of the season losing improbably often in both one-run and extra-inning games. They went 9-23 in the former kind of contest, and when close games went to extras, it was out of the frying pan, into the Friars: The Pads compiled a record-tying 0-12 record in extras until they won two of their final four games in the 10th and 11th. All told, they went 10-28 in one-run or extra-inning games (without double counting one-run games that went to extras). Among more than 2,600 teams that have played at least 20 close games in a season since 1901, the Padres’ .263 close-game winning percentage is sixth worst, after the 1935 Braves (.175), the 1916 Athletics (.239), the 1937 Browns (.250), the 2008 Braves (.256), and the 1999 Royals (.260).

The thing is, all of those teams were way worse than the Padres overall. In their non-one-run, non-extra-innings games, the Padres went 72-52. The outcomes of one-run and extra-inning games are highly luck dependent, but they aren’t entirely random: Terrible teams are still more likely to lose them than they are to win. The Padres weren’t a terrible team, except in close games. The gulf between their winning percentages in close and non-close games (.317) is the fourth largest since 1901, behind only the 1948 Indians (.355), 1935 Yankees (.344), and 2021 Rays (.329).

The Padres accomplished these inefficient feats by being incredibly unclutch, especially on offense. By FanGraphs’ “clutch” score, which dates back to 1974, the Padres were the second-least clutch team on record, beating out only the 2016 Twins, who lost 103 games. And per Baseball-Reference, their OPS in high-leverage situations was only 76 percent as high as their overall OPS, the eighth-worst relative mark in a full season since 1901. (This year’s Royals, who were both bad and unlucky, were tied for sixth worst.) The Padres’ OPS in extra innings was 40 percent of their overall OPS, though extra-innings samples are so small that they were “only” 43rd worst of all time. They were tied for 19th worst in “late and close” situations. Pick your Padres-split poison!

Perhaps the Padres’ lousy luck was more than that: It could have been partly a product of organizational dysfunction or a lack of leadership or effort, as some Padres postmortems alleged before the team belatedly found its rhythm (or regressed to the mean). Then again, losing breeds bad vibes, and it’s tough to watch a team come up empty at important moments so many times without perceiving something more than pure chance at work. Heck, it’s hard to play on a team that keeps coming up empty without feeling responsible: In August, Soto said the Padres sometimes gave up when they were losing, though he soon retracted his statement.

Historically, however, there’s been little consistency in teams’ results in one-run games either within seasons or across seasons. And for what it’s worth, the Padres weren’t unclutch last year. Know which team recorded the best record in close games last year? Yep: the Padres (33-17). The Mets, Angels, and Giants have already dismissed their managers in their quest for improved results, but Padres chairman Peter Seidler seems content to keep his reportedly feuding manager and general manager in place and hope the universe stops spiting his team. Some seasons, balls bounce into umpires instead of down the line. At least the Padres finished second in leaguewide attendance—naturally, behind the Dodgers, who would have won the West even if the Pads had played up to their expected record. It seems like a long time ago that rival owners and execs were fulminating against the Mets, Padres, and other free-spending teams breaking baseball. Or, for that matter, since the Padres seemed to be pioneering a bolder way to win.

Would this be a bad time to mention that the Marlins, who finished two and a half games ahead of the Padres and won the second wild card, were outscored by 56 runs? Or that they went 33-13 in one-run games—the seventh-best one-run record since 1901 (minimum of 20 one-run contests)—a year after going 24-40?

Much as small-market owners—or those who aspire to be labeled as small-market owners—may moan about competitive balance, spending hardly determines destiny in MLB. But for payroll to have almost no relationship to results, a lot of wacky stuff has to go wrong—or right, depending on one’s perspective. A lot of enchanting stuff has to happen, too—like, for instance, an MLB-wide youth movement that produced the second-most WAR by rookie position players ever, helping the prospect-rich Orioles beat the odds and the projections and catapulting teams like the Reds, the Diamondbacks, and the Twins into contention. As miserly owners are well aware, rookies come cheap.

In short—OK, maybe it’s a little late for this to be short—the 2023 MLB season has already gifted and/or cursed us with more than its fair share of unanticipated outcomes. Which has made it a wonderful warm-up for the predictably unpredictable chaos that’s about to begin.

Thanks to Jeff Euston, Kenny Jackelen, Zach Kram, and Ryan Nelson for research assistance.