Fantasy Football

2011 Major League Baseball: Do Wins Cost This Much?

You gotta spend money to make money.  That’s the saying, right?  Well this graph shows that, in baseball, spending money only leads to success if you have the ability to spend even more money when you’ve previously spent in the wrong places.  The top two teams in payroll made the playoffs, but the rest of the top ten highest spending teams missed the postseason.  

The key seems to be to spending money in player development while leaving your team the flexibility to address your needs midseason.  Four of this year’s playoff teams fit that description.  Texas, Detroit, St. Louis, and Milwaukee all sit in the 10-20 range of payroll, and all made moves either in the offseason or around the trading deadline to address weaknesses.  The acquisitions of Mike Adams, Doug Fister, Edwin Jackson and Zack Greinke were great additions that filled in holes around teams built primarily with homegrown talent.

Tampa Bay got there purely on their unmatched ability to acquire talent via the draft, and Arizona got there by making two very smart deals that landed them young, team controlled aces in Daniel Hudson and Ian Kennedy.  So yeah, you can spend money to be successful, but you better have a whole lot to spend or know exactly where and how to spend it.

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Click graphic to enlarge.

Infographic provided by David Fung. For more great infographs, follow him on Twitter @cobradave, and be sure to head over to his blog: http://FUNGraphs.tumblr.com

Commentary provided by Brett Talley (@TheRealTal) of TheFantasyFix.com.

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