No, the Dodgers Aren't Ruining Baseball

Saturday night the Dodgers traded for Tarik Skubal. I have a bunch of friends who are Dodgers fans, and I chewed them out for making a great trade.

If you missed it: Detroit sent a two-time Cy Young winner to Los Angeles for Zyhir Hope, River Ryan, and Brady Smith, two days before Monday’s deadline. Skubal is a free agent after this season, so the Dodgers rented the best pitcher in baseball for two months and a playoff run. He joins a rotation that already leads the majors in ERA and already had Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, and Shohei Ohtani in it.

The reaction was about what you would expect. Baseball is broken, the Dodgers bought another title, why do we even play the games.

Does money buy championships? I have heard that argument my whole life and I have never actually checked it. So I did. Every team, every season, from 2011 through 2025. That is 450 team seasons of payroll against record against how far they got in October, pulled from Spotrac and the official MLB Stats API and stitched together.

The answer is more interesting than either side of the argument.

Money matters less than you think

Across all 450 team seasons, the correlation between payroll and winning percentage is +0.39. Square that and you get 0.15, which means payroll explains about 15 percent of the difference in how teams finish. The other 85 percent is scouting, player development, health, coaching, and a whole lot of luck.

Put it in units that mean something: doubling your payroll is worth roughly 8.4 extra wins over a 162 game season. That is real. It is also about a week and a half of baseball.

If money were the whole story, the standings would just be the payroll list. They are not particularly close.

Money matters more than you think

Here is the part where the cynics get their evidence back.

Sort every team into five groups by where its payroll ranked inside its own season, then follow each group all the way to a title. Top five payrolls make the playoffs 60 percent of the time. Bottom five payrolls make it 18.7 percent of the time. That is better than three to one, and it is the single cleanest thing money does in this sport.

But look at the last bar in each group. Top five payrolls win the World Series in only 9.3 percent of their seasons. Spending buys the ticket; it does not buy the ring.

Since 2011, the bottom two payroll tiers have played 150 team seasons between them and produced zero championships. Not one club outside the top twenty in payroll has won a World Series in fifteen years. Thirteen of the fifteen champions came from a top ten payroll, and the median champion ranked seventh in spending.

So both things are true at once. Money is a bad predictor of who wins a given October. Money is an excellent predictor of who is allowed to try.

The Dodgers are not just rich

This is the part that should actually worry the other 29 teams, and it is not the payroll.

I built a measure called wins above payroll: fit winning percentage to spending across all 450 seasons, then measure how far each club sits from that curve, in wins. Positive means you beat your budget.

The Dodgers are plus 136.5 wins over fifteen years. Third best in baseball.

Read that again. The team with the largest payroll in the sport is also the third best in baseball at beating its own spending. They are not cheap per win, nobody at that payroll is. They are outspending everyone and then still outperforming what that spending predicts by about nine wins a year. Thirteen playoff trips in fifteen seasons, a .597 winning percentage, three championships.

You can build a farm system that beats your budget. Tampa Bay has by a mile. What you cannot easily do is beat your budget when your budget is already $350 million. The Skubal trade cost them three prospects, and the reason they had three prospects worth trading is the same reason they keep winning.

The teams that did everything right and won nothing

Tampa Bay is the best value operation in baseball and it is not even close. Plus 198 wins above what their payroll predicted, a .535 winning percentage on 54 percent of league average spending, seven playoff trips. Championships: zero.

Cleveland is the same story. Plus 158, .537, eight playoff trips, zero titles.

Both of those clubs have been better at their jobs than almost everyone else in the sport for fifteen years and neither has a trophy. If you want the honest case that the system is unfair, it is not that the Dodgers won; it is that Tampa Bay did everything a small market club is supposed to do, did it better than anyone, and it was not enough.

The reverse is uglier. The Angels spent $2.47 billion over fifteen years and made the playoffs once. They had Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani at the same time. Colorado is 163 wins below what its payroll predicted, worst in baseball.

Money is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. Detroit, by the way, sits at minus 68 on that same measure, which is a decent piece of context for why they were the ones selling an ace this weekend.

The gap is getting wider

Average team payroll went from about $101 million in 2011 to $176 million in 2025. That part is just inflation and revenue.

The spread is the story. The distance between the top and bottom of the league is stretching, the concentration measure keeps drifting up, and the biggest payroll now runs better than five times the smallest. Split my fifteen years in half and the playoff rate for top five payrolls climbed from 49 percent to 70 percent. Bottom five payrolls went from 14 percent to 23 percent.

Some of that is the field expanding to twelve teams in 2022, which helped everybody. But the top of the market gained more than the bottom did, in a change that was supposed to do the opposite.

What I actually think

The people yelling that the Dodgers bought a championship are wrong about the mechanism and right about the worry.

They are wrong because October is close to a coin flip and always has been. The Dodgers can run out Skubal and Yamamoto and Snell and Ohtani and still lose a division series to a team that got hot for five days. That is just baseball.

They are right because the coin flip is the only part that is fair. Getting to the table is not, and it is getting less so. When no team outside the top twenty in payroll has won in fifteen years, the tournament is competitive but the entry list is not.

Braves fans, for the record: Atlanta has spent $2.06 billion since 2011 and sits at plus 76 wins above payroll, fifth best in baseball, on almost exactly league average spending. Nine playoff trips, one title. That is a well-run organization by every measure I built. Last season they went 76-86 on the ninth largest payroll, which is the ugliest single line in an otherwise excellent fifteen year run, and a reminder that the model only tells you what usually happens.

I put the whole thing on the Sports Desk if you want to poke at it. You can filter to your team, find the season you are still mad about, and see exactly how much of it the money explains.