Major League Baseball has been around since 1869 and is considered America’s Pastime because of this. Baseball is also the only major sport in America without a salary cap and this means that teams can spend as much money as they have to re-sign players and sign big free agents. This has also caused much controversy in the sport because teams like the Yankees have won 28 World Series Championships, the most in history, but they have also always had one of the highest payrolls in the sport. Then there are teams like the Oakland Athletics who have almost always had one of the lower payrolls in the sports but have still found a very good amount of success. In this project, I will be researching the top 4, middle 4, and bottom 4 teams in salary for each of the last 10 seasons. I will then compare their salaries to wins and find out the average cost paid for win, as well as see how many World Series Championships have been won by teams that fall into those places Question: does having a larger salary cap in baseball guarantee you to have marginally more success than teams with smaller salaries? Play ball!

Data Sources For this project, I used two main baseball websites that are used by baseball writers and people all-around the world. These two websites provided me with information regarding the salaries from each year since 2005 and they also provided me with the standings from each season which I used to get those team’s records.

The way I analyzed my data was that I took the salaries and for each team in each tier for the last 10 years. After doing that I figured out the average salary, average wins (162 game season),and average cost per win for each tier for each year. I then turned these into bar graphs for each of those categories to easily compare the data.

Conclusion After gathering my information and analyzing it accordingly, I have come to the conclusion that teams with higher payrolls do tend to find more success than teams with smaller payrolls, but with some exceptions. In each year analyzed, you will find at least one team in each of the lower categories that had more wins than team(s) in the top 4. Many factors can cause this but it mostly comes down to is drafting good players and having them be successful at all Minor League levels before they get to MLB. Another effective way to get wins without much money is by signing cheap but effective players that may not be big name enough for big market teams to sign. Of all the teams analyzed, there were four World Series Champions from the last ten years that fell into these three tiers of payroll. Three of these teams were in the top four in payroll and one came from the middle group. So, although teams in bottom four do find success from time to time, they have not won a single World Series title in the last ten years. So in conclusion, if you got it, spend it. If not, you better be drafting good players and having good teams in order to boost attendance and get more money.