Yes

by JM Van Horn

Created on: November 19, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Without a doubt, salaries in baseball buy championships in this day and age. But before you make a decision on this subject, you need to understand what helped me make this decision.

To start this discussion properly, we need to examine how the franchises in Major League Baseball are governed when it comes to salaries. One term we here used quite often in the world of sports is salary cap. This is a limit of the amount of money a team can spend on a player's salary, usually as a total limit for the team roster. Majority of the time, the salary cap is put in place as a method of keeping overall costs down and keep balance in the league so wealthy teams are not able to become dominant by buying all of the top talent. Since being brought into existence, salary caps have always been a major obstacle in negotiations between management and player's unions.

Currently, the NFL, NBA, and NHL, all have mandated a version of salary cap in their leagues. This resulted in an increased parity in the league, it does allow for a greater turnover in playoff team. The cap has also limited the rate of increase of the cost to operate a NFL team and is believed to be the main reason why the NFL is the most stable organizations of the four major leagues. Instead of a salary cap, MLB has a luxury tax, which is an arrangement where when a team's aggregated payroll exceeds a specific annually figure; they are taxed on the excess amount. The money is paid to MLB, who in turn puts the money into a growth fund for the other teams in the league. Since the luxury tax arrived in 2002, it has only been collected a total of nine times, and five of those times belonged to the New York Yankees. As a result, this luxury tax does very little when it comes to maintaining a competitive balance and reducing the spending habits of the affluent teams. Of course, in any given year, most teams won't come close to making the playoffs. Since the expanded playoffs began in 1995, twenty-two of the thirty big league teams have reached the post season at least once. The New York Yankees, who usually have one of the top five payrolls in baseball, are the only team never to have missed the post season under the current system.

Now that we have a basic understanding of how the payroll system works in MLB, we can examine the history of the playoffs and the teams that advanced to the World Series. Since 1995, there have been 13 World Series played. Here is a list of the teams who have won the World Series during this time frame; the New York Yankees (4), the Boston Red Sox (2), the Florida Marlins (2), the Chicago White Sox (1), St. Louis Cardinals (1), Atlanta Braves (1), Los Angles Angels (1), and Arizona Diamondbacks (1). Things become interesting when you start to examine the winning team and where their team payroll ranked with the rest of the team during the winning season. Eleven times, the winner of the World Series had a payroll that was ranked in the top ten highest payrolls for that year. The only two exceptions were the 2005 Chicago White Sox when their team's payroll was only the 13th highest in the league and the 2002 Los Angeles Angels who only had the 15th highest payroll in the league. Both expansion teams, the Florida Marlins and Arizona Diamondbacks, have been criticized in the past for signing mercenary free agents to bring a championship to their town. While teams like the Yankees and Red Sox constantly spend large amounts of money in the off-season to ensure their team's return to the playoffs.

In the end, the teams with the money tend to be the ones who are competing in the Fall Classic every year. Yes from time to time, we do have teams with low payrolls make trips to the post season. A prime example would be the Oakland Athletics, who continues to lose quality players to free agency but always finds a way to build talent through their farm system. However this is a team who has only advanced past the division series once out of five attempts. This offers teams slim rays of hope and fans who tend to root for the underdog and enjoy it when teams like the Yankees or Red Sox falter down the stretch. If Major League Baseball wishes to bring more fans into the fold and continue to grow and expand its product, something will need to be done to help increase parity throughout the league and make sure all teams are on a level playing field when it comes to salaries.

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