What the World Series Doesn't Prove

Two low-payroll teams played for a title this fall. Fans of baseball's lowest spenders have lived a different story, and a salary floor is now on the bargaining table.

By the time this reaches your inbox, either Milwaukee or Tampa Bay will have won the first World Series in franchise history. Both got there on payrolls that would barely register in New York. The Rays opened the season at about $89.6 million, 26th in baseball. The Brewers opened at $125.5 million, 19th. The Mets started at $357.6 million, the most in the sport, and finished 74-88.

You can already hear the argument forming. Baseball doesn't need a salary cap, or a floor, or any of what the owners proposed this spring. Look who's holding the trophy. Smart teams win, rich teams lose, and the system works.

There's real evidence behind that. Cleveland had the lowest payroll in the majors this year and still reached the ALCS, where it met Tampa Bay in the first league championship series of the wild-card era between the two lowest-spending teams in a league. This year's champion will be the 17th different franchise to win a World Series this century, more than any other major American league can claim.

But a World Series has two teams in it. Baseball has thirty.

The Other End of the Table

Pittsburgh last played a postseason game in 2015. Since then, it has spent eleven straight Octobers at home, and its Opening Day payroll has ranked in the bottom ten of the league every season since 2012.

The roster history reads like a farewell tour. In January 2018, the Pirates traded Andrew McCutchen and Gerrit Cole within days of each other. Joe Musgrove went to San Diego three years later. Bryan Reynolds asked for a trade before the club signed him in 2023 to an eight-year, $106.75 million extension, a franchise record at the time.

None of that means the Pirates were losing money. Forbes estimated they were the third-most profitable franchise in baseball in 2023, with $68 million in operating income. From 2022 through 2024, the team took in about $215.6 million from tickets and concessions and spent about $214 million on player payroll. In a fairly literal sense, the people in the seats paid for the players on the field.

This year the Pirates finally finished above .500, at 82-80. It was their first winning season since 2018.

Miami tells a louder version of the same story. The Marlins have had 13 losing seasons in the last 15. After Bruce Sherman and Derek Jeter's group bought the club, it traded Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich, Marcell Ozuna and Dee Gordon within a few months. Stanton had just won the National League MVP. Yelich won the next one, in Milwaukee. In 2024 the Marlins sold again, moving Luis Arraez, Jazz Chisholm Jr. and much of the bullpen before the trade deadline.

The Rule Nobody Tested

Baseball already has a system that's supposed to stop this, and most fans never see it. Under revenue sharing, high-revenue clubs send money to low-revenue clubs. Recent estimates put the typical recipient's take somewhere between $40 million and $70 million a year. The labor agreement says each team must use that money “in an effort to improve its performance on the field.”

Club financial statements leaked in 2010 offered a rare look inside. They showed the Marlins receiving almost $92 million in revenue sharing across 2008 and 2009 and reporting a profit while carrying a payroll under $60 million.

The rule is loose by design. The money can go to scouting, analytics, facilities or player development, and none of it has to reach the major league payroll. In February 2018, the players' union filed a grievance against the Marlins, Pirates, Athletics and Rays for failing to spend the money appropriately. The league called the claims meritless. Eight years later, no public ruling has come out. The union withdrew its claim against the Rays last December, and the status of the other three remains unclear.

That's the backdrop for this winter. MLB's owners have proposed a hard salary cap of $245.3 million and, for the first time, a minimum of $171.2 million. By Commissioner Rob Manfred's math, 12 teams would have to add a combined $617 million in payroll to reach it. The union rejected the framework and countered with something softer, a “competitive integrity tax” on teams with payrolls under $150 million. The current agreement expires December 1, and a lockout is widely expected the next day.

What a Floor Would Actually Do

The simple version says a floor makes cheap teams spend. The leagues that have one suggest it's more complicated.

The NHL measures its floor in salary-cap charges rather than actual cash, and the Arizona Coyotes noticed. For years they traded for the contracts of players who would never suit up for them, Chris Pronger and Pavel Datsyuk among them, taking on cap charges far larger than the salaries they actually paid. Arizona met the floor and collected draft picks for the favor. The NBA had its own version, with teams claiming players off waivers late in the season so a full year's salary counted toward the minimum, until it tightened the rules in 2023.

The NFL closed most of those loopholes by measuring real cash over several seasons and requiring teams to pay any shortfall directly to their own players. Even there, a floor guarantees spending. It doesn't guarantee good spending.

Kansas City offers baseball's own warning. After six straight losing seasons, bottoming out at 56-106 in 2023, the Royals opened the checkbook. They extended Bobby Witt Jr. for 11 years and roughly $288.7 million and raised payroll three seasons running. At first it worked. They earned a wild-card berth in 2024 and swept Baltimore before losing to the Yankees. This year they opened at a franchise-record $141.2 million and went 69-93.

That gap shapes every Royals offseason. The club's entire opening payroll this year was less than 40 percent of the Mets'. Across the parking lot, the Chiefs work under the same salary cap as every other NFL team, so the best player on the market is at least within reach. The NFL also splits its national television money evenly, a big part of why Green Bay, the smallest market in the four major American leagues, can win a Super Bowl. Issue 3 looked at how much of that model would carry over to baseball, and economists still disagree.

Colorado is starker still. The Rockies haven't ranked in the bottom five in payroll in any season since 2012, yet they've had 13 losing seasons over that span, including 43-119 last year and 58-104 this year.

So money alone guarantees nothing. It still matters, though, and more in baseball than in the leagues with caps. Depending on the era, payroll explains somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of the difference in teams' regular-season wins. Over the last five seasons, it explained about 17 percent in baseball, about 9 percent in the NBA and almost nothing in the NFL. Part of the reason is the spread. In 2025, the five highest payrolls in baseball were 4.7 times the size of the five lowest, the widest gap on record.

Where money shows up most is over time. Since 2012, the Dodgers have reached the postseason in 14 of 15 seasons and the Yankees in 11, and neither has had a losing record in that span. A big payroll buys depth, the fifth starter and the bench bat that keep a team in the race through injuries and slumps. Studies have found that spending tracks more closely with wins over several seasons than in any single one.

The Dodgers have added another tool. Shohei Ohtani's 10-year, $700 million contract defers $680 million until after the deal ends, and the club has used deferrals in several contracts since. The deferred money lowers what those deals count against the luxury tax today, but it still has to be paid, which suits an owner who can count on large revenues decades from now.

That leaves two honest readings of the same evidence. One says a floor would at least force the Pirates and Marlins of the league to try, and that their fans have waited long enough for that. The other says a floor would push salaries up without handing those teams the scouting and player development that made Tampa Bay and Milwaukee work. Whoever won this World Series, it settles neither.

The Deeper Dive

Of the 26 players on Tampa Bay's postseason roster, 17 arrived by trade. Only four were drafted or signed internationally by the Rays. The approach is easy to describe and hard to copy. They sell players a year or two before those players get expensive, and buy players a year or two before anyone else notices them. One of their most famous deals came with Pittsburgh in 2018, when they sent Chris Archer to the Pirates for Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows and Shane Baz.

Milwaukee mixes the same trading habits with more patience. Fifteen players on its postseason roster came by trade and ten were homegrown. The Brewers moved Josh Hader, Corbin Burnes and Freddy Peralta rather than pay any of them in free agency, and this October Peralta was Tampa Bay's Game 3 starter against them. They also signed Jackson Chourio to an eight-year, $82 million contract before he had played a single major league game.

Cleveland builds from within. Sixteen players on its postseason roster were developed by the organization, and the franchise produced five Cy Young Awards between 2007 and 2020, with CC Sabathia, Cliff Lee, Corey Kluber twice and Shane Bieber. José Ramírez has signed extension after extension with the club rather than test the open market.

A Boston University study of all 30 teams from 2021 through 2025 found that payroll efficiency, how much winning a team gets per dollar, was one of the strongest indicators of postseason success. The 2025 Brewers won 97 games, four more than the Dodgers, with about a quarter of the payroll.

Can anyone else do it? Front offices around the league have studied the Rays for the better part of two decades, and every one of them now has an analytics department. The Rays still sit near the bottom of the payroll table and near the top of the standings.

One irony is worth keeping in mind as talks go on. Reporting suggests the owners' $171.2 million floor counts player benefits, which would put the actual payroll minimum closer to $148 million. Both of this year's pennant winners opened the season below that line. Under the owners' proposal, the two teams being held up as proof that baseball doesn't need a floor would have been required to spend more.

That could cut either way. Required spending might let a team like Tampa Bay keep the stars it now trades a year early, on top of the scouting edge it already has. Or the extra money could mostly push salaries up across the board, leaving the gap between the Rays and the Dodgers roughly where it is. No league has run that experiment with a team like Tampa Bay.

For the Curious

The Extra 2% by Jonah Keri tells how a group of former Wall Street traders took over one of baseball's worst franchises in the mid-2000s and turned it into a contender by finding small edges everyone else ignored. It was published in 2011, but the habits it describes, like trading stars early, buying undervalued players and treating every dollar like it was borrowed, are still how Tampa Bay won the pennant this year.

Worth Watching

The collective bargaining agreement expires December 1 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. If the owners lock out the players the next morning, as expected, all transactions involving major league players stop, and free agency freezes with them. Keep an eye on Pittsburgh and Kansas City this winter too. The Pirates are coming off their first winning season in eight years, and Royals owner John Sherman has said he's open to spending more if it improves the roster. Whatever they do before December 1 may say as much about the floor debate as anything said at the bargaining table.

That's the research. For my own take on this story, watch Beyond The Precedent.