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

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