The low-payroll pennant race

I recently heard a friend claim that the Cubs don't deserve their underdog status because in spite of their history, they are today just another big-market behemoth stomping the true underdog: his beloved Brewers. That argument made me wonder whether you could argue that the current Brewers are doing about as well as a team can given Milwaukee's payroll.

I translated that curiosity into a testable question: do the Brewers have the best record of any team with their payroll or lower? According to Ben Fry's chart, the answer is no, but I found the stats interesting beyond the simple question, so I constructed the standings of the Brewers-or-lower-payroll teams:

TEAM         W-L     SALARY   GB
Cleveland    93-63   $62M     0
Arizona      88-69   $52M     5
San Diego    86-71   $58M     7.5
Colorado     85-72   $54M     8.5
Milwaukee    81-76   $71M     12.5
Texas        74-84   $68M     20
Cincinnati   71-86   $69M     22.5
Washington   71-87   $37M     23
Kansas City  68-89   $68M     25.5
Pittsburgh   67-90   $39M     26.5
Florida      67-90   $31M     26.5
Tampa Bay    65-92   $24M     28.5

Obviously, Cleveland has had a remarkable year. Milwaukee is just above the TEX-CIN median of the twelve. The selection criteria exclude a handful of higher-salary teams doing worse than the Brewers, so Milwaukee looks better in the context of the whole MLB, but still only a little above average for their payroll. I'm surprised by how competitive the mid-level payroll teams are. Arizona and (in the truly low-payroll division) Washington stand out as teams producing a lot of value for the money. And to go back to an old hobbyhorse of mine, Tampa Bay must be a very, very profitable team given that puny payroll and revenue sharing, and that is a great shame.

A bottom line: if the season ended today, these 12 teams at the bottom of the payroll standings would produce three of the eight playoff squads. Not bad.

Graphickry: Team Salary, Team Performance

Ben Fry has concocted an ingenious interactive graph showing the relationship between each Major League Baseball team's salary and won-lost record for any day of the season.

To criticize such a graph--certainly the most interesting and useful presentation of this data that I've seen--would smack of churlishness and ingratitude. Hey, that's my cue!

The problem with the graph is that it distorts the relative positions of the team's salaries and performance by presenting them in evenly spaced lists on the two sides of the graph. Fry seems to recognize the problem with this approach on the salary side and therefore represents each team's salary by its line thickness as well as its position on the right side of the graph. The result is two visual representations of team salary that contradict each other: the Yankees' position on the right side of the graph inaccurately presents the teams a one evenly-spaced slot above the Red Sox, whereas the thickness of the line accurately but unintuitively reveals the huge gap between the top two teams. Combined with the deceptively even spacing of the team records on the left side, this flaw creates line slopes that can get seriously out of whack: at some points, one win or loss creates a deceptively large change in the slope of a team line, and the Yankees and Red Sox should be more obviously in their own leagues at the top of the salary side.

I've done enough web programming to know that my ideal graph would be vastly harder to program than Fry's already-complex one, so I understand his decisions; I just hope someone will surmount the technical hurdles to make an even better version of this.

I would also add a point of substance: it seems to me that team salaries in this context should include the costs and benefits of the luxury tax system. Which means that the Yankees are doing still worse.

In other words, Fry's graph makes the Yankees' season (to date--let's be clear) look disastrous, but it's actually much, much worse than it looks.