Want To Win The World Series In 2026? Hope You Have A Top-10 Payroll.

Any time baseball payrolls are brought up, particularly when done so by fans of a small or mid-market team, there’s a subset of the fandom that points to teams like the Guardians and the Rays. They insist that it’s entirely possible to win on a shoestring budget, and claim that teams just need to be smarter, to play small ball, to win in the margins. Here’s the thing, though: there’s 31 years of data that says that there’s a robust correlation between payroll and winning.

This isn’t to say that winning in the margins doesn’t matter. It does — when it comes to making the playoffs. Any advantage is significant. Advancing to the World Series, though, and especially winning it? That’s a different story entirely. Dating back to 1995, 84% of teams that made the World Series ranked in the top half of team payroll. As it turns out, having a high payroll is the best advantage of all.

Looking at this another way, just twice in the past 31 seasons has a team with a payroll in the bottom half of baseball won the World Series, and one of those was 16th, so it’s barely in the bottom half. Losing the World Series is a bit easier in the bottom half, as that has happened eight times over that same span. In 23 of the past 31 seasons, at least one of the World Series teams had a top-5 payroll.

Over this same 31-year span, fully 68% of the time, of the teams that made the World Series, the team with the higher payroll won. On average, spending equals winning.

One note on the figures I’m quoting: there are several different calculation methodologies, and it’s tough to pinpoint which is most accurate. Because I can go back to 1995 for all data, I’ll be using the Baseball Reference Miscellaneous Team Info tables. 

Let’s start by looking at the 2025 World Series teams. The winning Dodgers had the highest payroll, at $394 million. Their strength was having no fewer than four aces, three future Hall of Fame hitters, and a strong supporting cast. That’s the sort of thing you can do with $400 million. The losing Blue Jays were fifth, at $258 million. While their roster was not as star-studded, their entire lineup was average or better, and they signed Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to a huge deal earlier in the season.

How about 2024? The Dodgers, who won again, had the highest payroll at $353 million. The losing Yankees were third, at $316 million. In fact, three of the final four teams had budgets of at least $316 million.

2023 was an outlier, at least for the losing team. The Rangers, who won the World Series, had the sixth-highest payroll, while the losing Diamondbacks were outside the top half. In fact, they were all the way down at 20, with a $129 million payroll on the season.

2022? Back to the theme: Houston won the Series with the ninth-highest payroll, defeating the fourth-highest Phillies. Get it yet? Maybe a chart will bring this into even clearer focus.

As you can see, the average World Series participant had the ninth-highest payroll. Parsing this even further, the average World Series winning payroll is seventh in baseball. The average losing team? 11th. This becomes even more stark if we look at just the past 10 seasons, where the average winner is sixth and the average loser is ninth. That’s right - the average World Series participants are spending well above the median. Over 50% of the time, the winner had a top-five payroll.

In fact, the last time a team with a bottom-third payroll won the World Series, it was 2003. George W. Bush was president and Barry Bonds was the best player in baseball. The winners, the Florida Marlins, had the seventh-lowest payroll, and they defeated the Yankees, holders of the highest payroll. Of course, this Marlins team had the Rookie of the Year winner in Dontrelle Willis, future Hall of Famer Ivan Rodriguez, pre-arbitration Josh Beckett, Miguel Cabrera, and Juan Pierre, and they got career years out of Luis Castillo and Mark Redman. Their cast of supporting characters outperformed their modest salaries. In short, everything broke right for them, and they were truly outliers.

If you are following along at home, that means that a team who isn’t spending has won the World Series just 3% of the time over the past 31 years. While past performance doesn’t always determine future odds, it’s obvious that the odds do overwhelmingly favor the teams in the top third of budgets. The teams that spend near the top can attract the best free agents; they can afford to overpay, and most free agents want to play for a winner. If they know they will have a strong team around them, they are more likely to sign. The teams that choose to spend heavily are also able to assemble better depth. They can keep their homegrown talent as long as they would like, buying out the prime free agent seasons. All of these factors dramatically increase the likelihood of a deep postseason run. While the “poor” teams need everything to break right to have a chance, the “rich” teams can build in enough redundancies that a handful of things can go wrong — injuries to key players, a down year, etc. — and they still have a real chance.

Some Root Causes
It’s clear that the economics (and incentive structures) of baseball are, at best, badly bent if not entirely broken. Generally speaking, the teams that spend less profit more.

Commissioner Rob Manfred sees this, although he is not altogether honest about the specific causes, or their solutions. And, it’s complicated. Baseball has a lot of complexities that other sports don’t: the lack of a salary cap or floor (more on that in a moment), the inequities of market size, and the disparity in media revenue between teams. Making things even messier: the collapse of the RSN model and the shockwaves that has caused to team revenues. 

However, even with decreasing media revenues, owning a baseball team is a good business to be in. Many teams have publicly-subsidized parks and many have tax abatements. Baseball franchises continue to skyrocket in value. Over the past five seasons, per Forbes, the average franchise has added $750 million in value. This past season, just nine teams spent more than 50% of total revenues on payroll. Yet, many owners cry poor, claiming they can’t possibly spend more.

And the thing about the teams that choose not to spend? It is, very much, a choice. With the current CBA, every team in MLB receives a check for around $200 million before the first pitch is thrown. They receive 3.3% of the aggregated local revenues, and another roughly $90 million for their 1/30th share of national revenues. 

Another wrinkle in finding a solution is the fact that the MLB commissioner is chosen by the owners, and his role is to grow the sport, and to enrich the owners themselves. He has a vested interest in driving revenues, and there are a couple easy ways of doing this: making policy that benefits the big market teams with large and international fanbases, and helping teams cut costs. Of course, the easiest way to cut costs is by trimming payroll.

The Push For A Salary Cap
Lets revisit that lack of salary cap for a moment as there has been a thinly-veiled yet concerted effort to sell players and the public on his (and owners) desire for a cap. There are several data points here. First, this summer, Manfred recruited A-list former players to go into locker rooms to discuss baseball iniquities. It hasn’t gone well, and has escalated to perceived threats in both directions.

Then, last week, Bob Nightengale with the USA Today reported that Manfred is claiming that MLB teams collectively lost $1.8 billion last season, despite record attendance and ticket prices. By the way, overall baseball revenues have increased by 33% in the past decade. Of course, this does not mean that all teams have seen this increase. In fact, is more likely that the large market teams have disproportionately seen the benefit as baseball’s audience becomes more international, favoring teams like the Dodgers and Yankees. Further, the smaller market teams have been disproportionately impacted by slashed regional sports network (RSN) payments, exacerbating the divide.

Now, teams — and more specifically, their owners — would love to implement a cap, because every team would benefit. The coastal teams that generate more revenue and tend to spend more as well would love an excuse to cut, say, $100 million from payroll. The smaller market teams also benefit greatly, as they have a better chance of competing when they aren’t facing teams with five times their payroll. In short, a cap would put more money in ownership’s pockets.

Players, of course, don’t want a cap because it reduces the overall pool from which they will get paid. Top free agents would see a decrease in the size of their contracts, as fewer teams would have the cap space to pursue them. This would compress salaries, and would force good-but-not-great players to take significant paycuts as their markets would shrink even more than the best of the best. The more fringy players would likely be forced to sign deals at the minimum, or resort to minor league deals.

A sensible solution that enforces a cap would also implement a floor to introduce more parity to the sport. That would force teams like the Pirates, A's, Marlins, and Guardians to spend more — in some cases, significantly so. Of course, they are unlikely to be on board with this idea because as it stands, they are free to collect their revenue sharing and national media checks, not spend, and maximize their profits. As you can see, this becomes very complicated.

Because of the gulf between the rich and “poor” teams as well as the complexities feeding into the baseball wealth distribution, it seems inevitable that at least a portion, if not all, of the 2027 season will be lost due to lockout as reaching a new CBA will likely be quite challenging. In fact, there is additional evidence supporting this. During the October MLB Fan Council meeting, members were treated to a presentation that outlined some of these very topics: the competitive balance issue, that the league appears “open” to the idea of a salary cap (and presumably a floor, as well), and their perception that a large percentage of the MLB fanbase would be willing to tolerate a fully lost season if it meant more parity between teams.

Should a lengthy lockout occur, it remains to be seen whether a true solution will be implemented, or if one even exists. Because of the gulf between the rich and “poor” teams as well as the complexities feeding into the baseball wealth distribution, any solution would likely be a half-measure. If a salary floor were introduced, it would likely be below the typical spending levels of all but the cheapest of teams, minimizing its positive impact on players. Many teams still would be unlikely to even approach the cap limit, and the iniquities would persist. However, the commissioner’s office is probably correct. Fans would like to believe that in any given year, their hometown team has a real chance to win it all.