MLB Teams: Money can’t buy a World Series

MLB Teams are willing to spend big to pursue a World Series. But money is often not the key factor for Series-winning teams, here’s why.

MLB Teams chasing Gerrit Cole, Anthony Rendon or other high-dollar free agents on the assumption that they will provide the final piece to a World Series-winning puzzle should be forewarned: Those scenarios rarely work out.

And on the few occasions when they do, the impact is short-term at best.

Among the past five World Series champions, four retreated to non-contender status within a couple of seasons of their glory. The Washington Nationals, particularly if they lose Anthony Rendon, maybe on the verge of becoming the fourth such team in five seasons.

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Since their championship seasons, the 2014 Giants, 2015 Royals, 2016 Cubs, and 2018 Red Sox have lost an average of 18 games in the standings. Only the 2017 Astros avoided decline…and the jury’s still out as to whether their ongoing success was abetted by cheating.

There are two reasons why continued championship success in Major League Baseball is so fleeting. The first reason is that the most controllable asset for MLB teams – money – is not a dominant factor in determining outcomes. The second is the role pure luck plays in winning, especially at the game’s culminating stages.

The over-rated role of money in actually ensuring a World Series championship is easy to establish. Across the decade of the 2010s, the two highest-spending teams were the Yankees and Dodgers, both exceeding $2 billion in total payroll.

Neither team won a single World Series title during that decade.

For the 2019 season, the relationship between team payroll and games won was a relatively weak 31 percent. Five of the 10 post-season teams – the  Rays, Athletics, Braves, Twins and Brewers – spent less than the MLB average $133 million payroll.

The Nationals won the World Series with the fourth largest payroll – trailing the Red Sox, Yankees, and Cubs. In the World Series, they beat the Astros, who had the 10th largest payroll.

In 2017, the Astros won the World Series with the game’s ninth smallest payroll, just $97 million. When the Cubs won in 2016, five MLB teams had higher payrolls. The Royals won in 2015 with only the 17th largest. When the Giants won in 2014, they – like the 2016 Cubs – ranked sixth in payroll.

The second element that MLB teams signing high-dollar players such as Gerrit Cole can’t fully control is pure fortune. Especially in decisive playoff games, chance sometimes plays an outside role in determining a team’s fate.

One need only think back to the concluding moments of this season’s National League Wild Card game between the Nationals and the Milwaukee Braves. Milwaukee led that game 3-1 with the bases loaded and two out in the bottom of the eighth when Juan Soto’s base hit to right eluded Brewers outfielder Trent Grisham, allowing three runs to score.

If Grisham had fielded the ball, as usual, the game would have been tied 3-3, and while the Nats might still have won, that outcome would have been no certainty. As it was, that moment kick-started the Nats’ drive to the title.

Such moments are not at all uncommon in teams’ post-season hopes. Would the Cubs have won that seventh game in 2016 if rain had not interrupted Cleveland’s momentum at the start of the 10th inning?

Would the Royals have won in 2015 if Carlos Correa had fielded Kendrys Morales’ potential double-play ball in the eighth inning of the fourth game of their 2015 Division Series? As it was, Correa muffed the potential inning-ender, the Royals scored three runs to win 9-6 and eliminated the Astros two days later.

And how much was the 2014 Giants’ World Series win impacted by the wild pitch that Washington’s Aaron Barrett threw in the seventh inning of San Francisco’s 3-2 victory in the deciding fourth game of their division series? Pablo Sandoval came home on that wild pitch with what became the series-winning run. Absent it, that game probably would have gone into extra innings, leaving open the possibility that the Giants’ run might never have reached the NLCS, much less the World Series.

Major League post-seasons these days are filled with seemingly arbitrary moments possessing an out-sized influence on the outcome of a playoff round. It is no slight on Cole’s potential impact to suggest that there is no amount of money a GM can throw at a player that is sufficient to ensure post-season success.