Sabermetric Drive By: Buying Titles

Seems like for the near future, every time the Yankees or Red Sox win the World Series will have to deal with the complaints that teams are “buying championships.” This discussion on Baseball Think Factory is an example.

One of the reasons I think I had such a spectacular burnout with this sport is that once you get as deeply involved with something as I was, you wind up developing an opinion on just about everything. Because of my natural inclinations, whenever a topic came up that I wanted to argue about, I’d dive head first into a series of studies, calculations, research (etc.) in order to support the point I was trying to make.

This is an excellent habit for researchers; every statement you make ought to be supported by a set of verifiable facts. But as a hobby and for someone with my relatively fragile mental state, it’s just exhausting mentally.

So I’ve told myself that whenever I get the urge to do 5 different mini-studies on 5 different topics in one 24 hour period, I need to step back, take a deep breath and let someone else carry the water for a while. I’ve found you never run into a shortage of people wanting to argue with you (especially if you have some minor degree of fame in the field), so it’s up to you to set limits on yourself.

With that in mind, there’s studies to be done here. Most payroll and winning studies (like the one Zimbalist mentions in the article), should be done using opening day payrolls, so that the causes always precede their effects. With the unbalanced schedule, you may need to make strength of schedule adjustments to be completely thorough. You then still need to deal with reverse causation issues involving the fact that winning one year often leads to higher payrolls the next.

But for right now, I’m not going to do any of these things. I’ll simply comment that of course all teams who won a World Series bought it in some shape or form. An amateur team has never won the World Series (at least not this version of it) and so to get the players, managers, farm system, front office and other stuff necessary to do it, somebody has to cut some checks. It should not be surprising that the more checks that are written, the better chance the team has at success. There ought to be some relationship there. I guess the point of discussion is how much and what to be done about the structural advantages a team like the Yankees might have.

(H/T) Tommy Tango on The Book, The Blog.