Baseball fans around the world groaned last week when the New York Yankees won their 27th World Series title (well, except for the Yankees fans’ anyway). One of the most common complaints against the new champs is that the owners buy their team, courting the best players with salaries that other teams simply can’t match. The question is: can a team be bought?
“Certainly, money can’t buy you championships, but it can assure you a competitive season,” said Brian Whitehead, a sports blogger for the Daily Titan at Cal State.
He’s right: a big payroll does seem to help.
When comparing the average salaries of each team using data from Espn.com and Usatoday.com, it turns out that out of the ten teams with the highest average salary, seven of them had winning records, with total payrolls topping out at more than $100 million.
Where are they getting that kind of cash? Many sports analysts and bloggers say that large markets equal large fan bases, which in turn equals more cash to throw around at hot-shot players. How much are teams making from fans, and does that have an effect on player salaries?
So, here’s the math.
The Team Marketing Report, an independent agency that evaluates professional sports teams, published a report on the FCI, or Fan Cost Index, for each major league baseball team.
The FCI is based on an average of the home stadium’s ticket prices, as well as the cost of food and souvenirs in the ballpark. The FCIs range from around $100 to more than $500. On average, the teams with the highest salaries also sat high on the list ranking FCIs, with the New York Yankees sitting at the top of both lists, with an FCI of over $500 and an average player salary of over $7.7 million.
The Yankees may be on top, but they’re not the only team benefitting from a huge bank account. Statistics show that average salary accounts for about 20 percent of the wins attributed to any given team. Also, 5 out of 8 of the teams in the postseason had average player salaries in the top 50 percent of all baseball teams.
In each round of the 2009 postseason, the team with the higher average player salary came out on top, finally ending with the New York Yankees, who have the highest average in the league.
It turns out that you can buy a team, and the Yankees have the rest of the league beat.
“[Another advantage a team has] is soundly trumped by the big money the Yankees (and other free-spending teams) can afford to throw at every elite player who hits the free agent market year after year,” said blogger ‘Twayn’, a writer for www.stickandballguy.com.
