October 10, 2007

Money can't buy you love

.. or a championship.

Some interesting numbers from MLB in the US

The most expensive team in baseball, the $189.7 million New York Yankees (and that's a pre-Roger Clemens figure) went down this week with a whimper. The team with the third-highest opening day payroll, the New York Mets ($115.2 million), collapsed long before that.

Nos. 4 and 8 – the Los Angeles Angels and Chicago Cubs, respectively – couldn't win a playoff game. Nos. 5-7 (Chicago White Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers and Seattle Mariners) didn't even make it to October. Neither did No. 8 to 12.

People like to decry baseball's salary disparity and lack of championship opportunities for small-market teams, but once again the playoffs are proving otherwise.

Yes, the $143 million Boston Red Sox, with the second-highest payroll according to USA Today's salary database, have reached in the American League Championship Series. But they're joined in the final four by the Cleveland Indians (No. 23), Colorado Rockies (No. 25) and Arizona Diamondbacks (No. 26). Those three payrolls total $168.2 million, $21 million less than the Yankees' entire outlay.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is really overdue, but it's been an extremely rough month. My thought for this post is this: I cannot help but think of the social good potential these kinds of monetary figures would have, but this money is "wasted" on entertainment. It's in the same class of thought as to why people who can afford to buy anything get the freebies wherever they go. Disturbing, but never surprising in our current age.

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