Organizational Ranking Weights
Beginning next week, we will be rolling out our 2011 Organizational Rankings, and due to a reaction that we’ll just refer to as “popular demand”, we’ve revamped the system and are doing them a bit differently this year. Last year, you guys asked for a system that is a bit less subjective than what we had done previously, and since we’re into objective measures around here, that seemed like a perfectly natural request. So, this time around, we’re going with a model that weights what we consider to be the four main variables to a franchise’s success, resulting in a final tally.
Of course, the model is being designed by humans, so there is still room for subjectivity in the results. After all, we all likelyhave differing opinions on the relative weights that should be assigned to each variable, and those weights would likely become a new target of angst for those who disagreed with the final outcome for one team or another. So, in the spirit of the Wisdom Of Crowds, you guys are going to help decide the weightings for each of the four identified variables.
The four categories are as follows.
Financial Strength
This category will essentially cover the revenue generating capabilities of each market, as well as the capability of the current ownership to invest money back into the franchise. Obviously, there are large disparities in revenue streams among markets, and certain owners are able to put more of their own money into a franchise than others. Factors relating to access to capital, both short term and long term, will be included here, as well as the organization’s payroll flexibility in the future. The perceived wisdom of an owner or ownership group is not part of this variable. This is strictly the financial aspects of the organization.
Baseball Operations
Here we will evaluate the relative merits of each organization in terms of acquiring and developing talent. The organizational philosophy and interest level by the executive level will be included, as will the abilities of the front office to identify how to put together a big league roster, the perceived quality of the organization’s scouting department, and the on-field development staff that helps the players develop their talent into productivity. Essentially, this area will focus on how well we believe the team will be able to use their stock of talent and create new ones going forward without considering the team’s financial resources, which are covered separately.
Present Talent
This area will look at the players who are capable of producing value now and in the near future (given that they are under team control beyond 2011, anyway). Those teams who are setup to contend now, or could legitimately be expected to be strong contenders soon based on what they already have on the roster, will be rewarded here for the talent they have on hand.
Future Talent
This area will deal with the relative strength of each team’s farm system. For those who have undergone several years of struggles while focusing heavily on developing internal talent, they will find their reward in this category. Likewise, teams that have mortgaged the future will be dragged down by the slow flow of value that may be expected from the current state of prospects in the system.
Each of these areas are important to an organization’s success, but they aren’t equally important. So, while I have my ideas for what the relative weights of each should be, I wanted to get your input as well. While the weights that you guys vote on may not match exactly what we end up using for the model, the results of the polls below will be a significant factor in deciding how each category is valued.
Happy Voting!
22
INB4 #6org
We know (more or less) how much money teams have spent, and we know how many wins those teams accumulated. Shouldn’t we be able to calculate the correlation of financial support to organizational success more precisely than asking people to vote on it? I’m not saying I can do it, but it does seem like their should be an objective answer.
We can do better than this, can’t we?
Financial Budget is quantifiable.
We can also quantify current roster talent via weighted WAR.
Future talent is quantifiable as well.
Baseball Ops? That’s the most subjective piece here. Why not use a weighted ranking by experts. That would quantify it, as well.
4 variables… one IV: W/L. Run a simple regression.
Aaagh roc beat me to it.
those results seem boring. i guess that means it worked…
My weightings took into account that some factors influence others, so in effect you are double counting. Financial Strength raises all three of the others factors. Present Talent raises Future Talent and Financial Strength. Baseball Ops raises both the Talent factors. Future Talent doesn’t directly affect the other factors.
If you ask the Pirates, future talent affects Financial Strength (the description above says both “short term and long term”)
The Pirates need to understand that, “If you build it [a good team], they [the fans] will come.” It doesn’t work vice versa.
“The Pirates need to understand that, “If you build it [a good team], they [the fans] will come.” It doesn’t work vice versa.”
The Rays might disagree with that statement.
That’s the problem with most teams. Even the White Sox who usually ahve a fairly generous payroll have been known to say “we’ll see if we can afford to add someone at the trading deadline based on how good attendance is.” Since players cost a lot of money they see them as liabilities which they are from an accounting standpoint. The contract is written, it’s a sunk cost. But they are also a product to be sold which makes them assets. Not directly of course, but by paying a player you are paying for the right to sell people the opportunity to see him work which is all you or he has as a ballplayer.
Most teams are stuck on the liability part of it and don’t invest in the product to make it more attractive for people to buy. More simply put, if they put a good team on the field people will buy tickets and media outlets will throw money at you for broadcasting rights. If they put crap out there, it isn’t fair to blame people for not wanting it.
not sure this holds true for really small markets. Look at Tampa. They won the World series, currently field one of the better teams in the game and still can only sell out Boston and NYY games at home. Another is FLA. the marlins have won 2 WS and they never sold out games the years after they won. Plus, they have been a winning team most years (barely most years), so they make a good product per se. In neither case did winning bring riches and attendance.
Oakland is a small and poor market with likely little chance of better fortunes despite winning most years.
Pittsburg is a smallish and modestly wealthy market. They will never get huge attendance even if they win.
I should restate that to “MAY never get huge attendance even if they win.”
The Rays have not won a world series.
Tampa didn’t win the world series.
Financial Strength has nothing to do with Baseball Ops (Bill Bavasi) and it doesn’t impact Present & Future Talent unless a) Baseball Ops are sound and b) ownership is willing to reinvest their profits in the form of aggressive international signings, over-slotting, free agents, contract extensions, etc. A team’s willingness to spend is just as important as its revenue and budget, and every team is different.
So financial strength doesn’t drive the ability to sign FAs (part of Baseball Ops)? Ask the Royals, TB, Oakland, and Pirates. They will tell you without the cash to burn, from ownership or not, they cna’t sell their team to FAs. they may be perfectly willing to reinvest, they just need the means to do so.
An organization must also be a contender with a strong foundation going forward. Money alone isn’t enough. The Pirates and Royals are perennial losers with a recent history of poor decision making. No FA wants to spend the back 9 of his peak years with an organization like that. When the Tigers found themselves in a similar situation several years ago, they switched gears and poured their cash reserves into areas they had control over: scouting, player development, over-slot bonuses, and international talent. They stuck with that plan and created a stable foundation for themselves. The Pirates and Royals, or any other team for that matter, are welcome to do the same.
Foundation > Winning > Free Agents.
As contenders already, the Rays are different. Unfortunately, no matter how many games they win, no matter how loaded the system gets, no matter how adept the FO proves to be, the fact is they play 82-games in an abandoned warehouse with a smattering of fans, most of them in raucous support of the visiting team. Until they change their address, money will be an issue and big time FAs will avoid that place.
The A’s have been doing it right for awhile. They have struggled to develop their own offensive talent in recent years, and most FA hitters don’t like either the stadium or the fact it’s not LA, where endorsement opportunities are infinitely higher.
How does present talent raise future talent?
Potential trades, draft compensation, increased revenue from ticket sales.
It’s double counting. It’s weighting. Of course, each factor influences the others, but they are each valid on their own and if you’re trying to figure out how an organization will do going forward you need to take them all into consideration. Take Tampa Bay as an example. IMO, they would rank very high in future talent and baseball ops. With the exodus of talent over the winter, they might not rank in the top third anymore in present talent . You have to give a weighting for financial strength because it will greatly influence whether they can get back to the top and sustain it. The easy answer would be that they did it before with the same financial resources, so they can do it again, therefore financial resources don’t matter. But I would argue that the circumstances have changed a lot for the Rays. When they were putting together the team that went to the World Series, the Rays were a last place team for 10 years with no expectation of winning. There was also a feeling that “if you build it, they will come”. Well they built it and they didn’t come – at least not to the extent expected. There are also expectations now in Tampa. Its a lot easier to stockpile prospects when there are no expectations. Not that it can’t be done, but as we saw this winter, financial resources do play a significant role in Tampa and it will be interesting to see if they can put it all together again in a changed environment.
dave, I think the buckets might be too big here. when you are talking about weighting 4 factors, the difference between 20% and 30% is huge. I think it might make more sense to offere discrete choices at 5% intervals, i.e. 15,20,25,30,35,40
Agreed, those options were what I was looking for and perhaps a ranking of the categories (although I’d imagine 3,4,2,1 would be the overwhelming response.)
Definitely. My math (counting “20-29%” as 24.5% and “30-39%” as 34.5%, etc) says that the vote’s current results are:
Present Talent 28.4%
Baseball Ops 27.4%
Future Talent 22.8%
Financial Strength 22.0%
My guess is that the Fangraphs commentariat will overweight Baseball Ops and underweight Financial Strength, relative to reality. Same with Future Talent vs. Present Talent (ignoring the concept of net present value).
I think baseball ops is overweighted based on the current voting. Even if you have that special, special brainiac front office that can get the “extra 2%,” you’re still in the same boat as the rest of the retrograde morons for that other 98%.
On top of that…how well can it actually be measured? I’d guess not well. To me, Baseball Ops should easily be given the lowest weight for that reason alone.
-j
True, but at least then you can blame the masses when your system screws up.
Net present value is pretty irrelevant to baseball teams, though. A win in 2012 is basically worth what a win in 2011 is. Most fans don’t care that much about exactly when they get a championship.
Soap Box:
Financial Strength is the single most important factor. As 57Kevin pointed out, that can drive all other categories. Spending can cover poor drafts, poor trades, etc. While spending doesn’t guarantee success, it increases the odds of success more than any other aspect of running an organization.
Give most GM’s $200m and they can create a 90+ win team. Give most GM’s $60m and maybe only a few can create consistent 90+ win teams.
Off Soap Box
Stay up on that soap box, BJ. Money isn’t the be-all, end-all. Just look at the Mets and Cubs. But money allows you to get out from under your bad contracts and cover up your drafting mistakes. It also gives you more resources to prevent those mistakes in the first place.
Just as an example, if the Cardinals sign Pujols to $30M/year and he blows out a knee or develops chrionic back problems they are done. If the same thing happens to the Yankees it hurts but they can still contend.
“While spending doesn’t guarantee success, it increases the odds of success more than any other aspect of running an organization.”
Of course, just spending alone won’t make you a winner. Just like having an amazing farm system won’t guarantee you success. However, teams that have high spending (not just payroll but draft, development, etc) are significantly more likely to have success than those that are low spending teams.
Looking at 2010 as an example – if you break the league into 3 groups here is how they correlate to overall winning % (assumes approx 85 wins to be in the playoff hunt):
Highest Spenders – avg 87 wins – 60% at 85+ wins
Middle Tier Spenders – avg 80 wins – 40% at 85+ wins
Lowest Tier Spenders – avg 75 wins – 30% at 85+ wins
For 2009 here is the breakdown:
Highest Spenders – avg 88 wins – 70% at 85+ wins
Middle Tier Spenders – avg 80 wins – 40% at 85+ wins
Lowest Tier Spenders – avg 75 wins – 30% at 85+ wins
So without considering ANY other factors (talent levels, farm system, Gm effectiveness) it’s clear that spending has a very high correlation with winning. The probability of making it to the post-season is dramatically higher if you are in the top 1/3rd of the leagues payrolls.
While it’s true that some lower spending clubs do have success it is often very difficult to sustain that success over a span of multiple years. While the converse is true that high revenue teams can often achieve success over a longer duration.
If you can find a single factor that is a better predictor of success than team payroll I would love to see it. That was my point. If you can spend then you can improve your current team. You have greater flexibility for making trades. You can draft talent that other teams shied away from due to bonus demands. You can sign Latin American / Asian talent as quasi-FA’s. A higher payroll can cover a multitude of otherwise poor decisions.
BJ, one of the criteria is team talent. I guarantee you that talent has a higher correlation with success than payroll.
Nate, are you suggesting that team wins is a good predictor of team wins? Controversial, to say the least.
Nate – we are talking about sustained success. It is incredibly hard (though not impossible) for a team to have sustained success with a small payroll.
You may have bursts of success as a few superstars emerge from your farm system but unless you have the resources to retain them that success is fleeting.
In any given year virtually any team can put together an amazing run and make a playoff push. Very few teams can repeat that process year in year out. And the pool drops even lower when you consider the teams that can do with a payroll of less than $100m.
BJ: I think the big question is how spending in 2007 impacted winning percentage in 2010. Especially as compared to how wins or Baseball America farm system ranking in 2007 impacted winning percentage in 2010.
Give Tony Reagins $200m and the Angels still don’t get Crawford or Beltre.
But maybe they trade for Carlos Lee or Soriano as well as Vernon Wells.
And yet the idiots who run the Angels have dominated the division for a decade. Front office = not that important. Even spectacular head-slappers like the Wells trade have a way of not being as big a deal as people think at the time.
It’s also a lot easier to replace a mediocre GM than it is to radically improve a team’s financial strength. It’s easier to like a team that wins 90 games on a low budget than one that wins 90 games with inefficient high-spending, but the team with money has an easier route to continue winning.
I was agreeing with you, sorry I didn’t make that clear. It is great to scout, draft, sign and develop talent . Nothing is more likely to result in a successful baseball team (especially long term) than paying good players lots of money. It’s not the only way to be successful but it is the surest. Not spending money on good players is the best way to be unsuccessful. It leaves you no margin for error. Your cheap players all have to develop together and you don’t have money to replace one with a FA if you are wrong. Just as guys get good, you lose them so it is harder to sustain success. You can overcome frugality but it is hard. As you beautifully pointed out, payroll correlates with success very well. Of course, having money also allows you to hire more scouts, pay bigger bonuses to draft choices and sign international free agents. It’s just shows up most with veteran free agents.
Basically, if you spend less you have to do everything else better.
+1 I’m surprised this ended up being the lowest of the 4 buckets (at least at the time I’m looking at the results).
I’m left wondering if people want it to be less of an effect instead of assessing how much of an effect it actually is. I would think this of all the factors would get the heaviest weight if the rankings are attempting to reflect reality
I don’t think you can properly weight without defining the question you are trying to answer. In the case at hand, it makes a difference whether you are ranking the organization for success over the next several years, the next decade, or some period longer.
The longer range the perspective, the more weighting I would give to financial strength and the less weighting I would assign to present talent. Compress the time frame and that reverses.
Very good point on the timeframe, although I disagree with the weighting differences:
The longer the time frame, the less I would weigh financial strength. Given a 10 year time frame, I would weigh future talent and baseball ops more, given that they have time to develop and draft talent.
Given a 3 year time frame, I would weigh financial strength and present talent much more, given that they could augment their current talent with high priced free agents to fill out the roster.
As we found out last year, it doesn’t matter how you weight it if you don’t analyze the components for each team properly.
Bingo.
This post does not at all address the problems that last year’s list created. Just because we-all get to vote on the weights for the four areas doesn’t mean the lists thus become more objective. It’s still up to a few guys to subjectively decide how each organization ranks in each category. If this year’s Dave Cameron thinks this year’s Ryan Rowland-Smith can be described as a “young talent,” the final rankings are going to suffer from the same problems the previous one did. You need to come up with objective ways to measure each of the categories, not just objective weightings for the subjective measurements you’ll make.
Plus, as Basil Ganglia notes just above, another big problem with last year’s ranking was that no one was quite sure what exactly the rankings described. In addition to objective measurements and objective weights, you need clearly-definable criteria that the rankings are supposed to measure.
Or, you know, you could just admit that this whole thing is BS, albeit kind of fun BS, and give up the pretense of objectivity.
Dumb question: How are you defining present and future talent? Is is as simple as present talen = mlb roster, future = prospects? I guess I am trying to get at, where does the length of contract of present talents go? The Cards have Pujols this year, and who knows about next, but the Rays have longoria for years to come.
Also, these weights might not be linear. As financial strength increases, does its weight also increase?
I think the single most important factor is that the write-ups are consistent and clear. There is going to be debate, that is inevitable and presumably welcome. That debate will be a lot less frustrating if the points for or against are constructed to be as comparable as possible.
I think this may make them less interesting to read, and may come off as dry, but I think it’s an important trade-off for this series.
I would also suggest trying to look at maybe only a three year window, since we all know that in three years these rankings will look dramatically different anyway (if they aren’t already dramatically different after one year).
Present and Future Talent is a bit tricky to balance. Present Talent is easier to predict, and a high rating here gives a team a window to build up their Future Talent if it’s not already apparent. On the other hand, for a team that’s not a contender, the Present Talent is mainly only important for its ability to contribute to the team’s future. I gave Present Talent the highest weight – a team that’s a contender now will get financial benefits from their success, and it’s a category that’s less dependent on the others to reap benefits – but there’s also a sharp drop off in the importance of the Present Talent as you move into the middle of the pack.
Baseball Ops is a tricky one, because while it’s extremely important, it’s already heavily reflected in the other three. A front office is judged mainly on its ability to acquire present and future talent while managing the team’s finances responsibly, so in most cases, this rating should just reinforce what the others already tell us. I see this more as a category to allow a little bit of subjective leeway when the other parts don’t reflect the direction the organizations’ going in rather than a pivotal part of the ranking.
I may be silly for suggesting an equal weight across the board, but that’s how I see it.
I might be silly, but I agree. I thought about it deeply for about 5 minutes and decided that it is impossible to weigh one more heavily than the other.
For example, financial strength gives an organization a lot more flexibility to overcome poor front office decisions; however, no matter how much money you have, poor front office management can keep a club underperforming. Conversely, while a strong front office can produce competitive talent much more cheaply, it is difficult to sustain without financial resources for buying out arb/FA years or signing talent to plug holes.
It just goes in circles in my head because they are all interrelated so I came to the same silly conclusion that they should all be equal.
Dave,
The biggest issue I see with the entire idea of organizational rankings is that you don’t define the objective. “Organizational Success” is about the best I can muster from 2 years of this. How you define success is what leads you to the proper weights. For example, if you define success as:
Winning the World Series next year. You would weight current talent at 80% and money/front office as 10%, and future talent at 0%. Or something like that.
Winning the WS in the next 3 years: maybe 50% current talent, 20% GM, 20% money, 10% future talent.
Winning the WS in the next 10 years: Current talent plummets, etc.
You see how this changes the weighting? It was partially why you ranked your Mariners so highly last year, and why it looked so bad. The longer view you take, the more Front office, money, and future talent come into play. The M’s were god awful last year, but if you were taking a 10 year view, maybe they really weren’t too far off from the #6 spot you claimed in the preseason.
This entire exercise will continue to be a gigantic waste of time until the actual objective of the ranking system is spelled out in detail.
I think Telo’s point is the crux of the matter. You must define success before measuring who is most likely to acheive success.
For my 2c, I would say that using World Series championships, whether over the next 1, 3, 10 – whatever – years is not a great metric. The World Series is too much of a crap shoot. Behold my beloved ’06 Cardinals.
Instead, I would try to guage success by having a foundation – on the field, financial, through operations, future talent, whatever – to have a strong chance to make the playoffs for the forseeable future.
I agree completely. Try this on for size:
Lose in LDS: 2 point
Lose in LCS: 3 points
Lose in WS: 4 points
Win it all: 5 points
Win Division: bonus 1 point
Now, for a franchise monetarily, or for a fan base’s loyalty/excitement/entertainment value, winning a World Series and advancing each subsequent round is much more valuable than a 2/3/4/5 scale. However, from a baseball ops perspective, I like these weights.
Now, if you are rating this purely from a traditional fan’s perspective, I could easily see giving more weight to winning it all. But, as saberists, I think this is a pretty good way of evaluating how successful our team was in a given season, considering the luck involved in going deep in the playoffs.
Looking at it again, and after adding the bonus pt for div winner, I think WS win should be 6 or maybe 7 points.
Lose in LDS: 2 point
Lose in LCS: 3 points
Lose in WS: 4 points
Win it all: 7 points
Win Division: bonus 1 point
Then the question becomes, how many years do you evaluate or take into account when creating the rankings? Well, what’s the average life cycle of a team…the Rays turned it around in about 5 years, but that was the best case scenario. So, totally arbitrarily let’s call it 8 years. That’s about the length of time where if you gave a new GM the reigns and said, “If you can’t make it to the postseason 3 times, and gather a total of 10 organization points, you have failed as our GM.”
Now we have a criteria to base our rankings off of. Who will have the most ORG points in the next 8 years.
I like your system, Telo. My first thought was that I’d be willing to go a little higher for a WS win and viola!
I was thinking of a shorter time horizon. Basically, here is the state of your organization today. Here are the metrics. How well do we see your organization doing? You are looking at it from the standpoint of “How well can you do from scratch given a reasonable amout of time?” Either seems fine too me.
Yea, that’s a great point, too. The “from scratch” scenario may not be the most useful to use as a baseline. More like, “this is who we are right now – what can we expect in the next 5 years”. I like that better.
If you assume (as we nerds sometimes do) that teams entering the postseason have roughly equal chances of winning the World Series, then there should be an almost linear relationship between E(postseason appearances) and E(world championships). So you don’t change the rankings by choosing one over the other.
Why you say THIS? Especially as a Cardinal fan?
The 06 team was basically the same as the 100+ Win 04 and 05 teams … one went to the WS, the other lost the NLCS.
The 06 team was decimated by injuries all through the season and got healthy right before the playoffs.
I fail to see why the 06 Cardinals are a “World Series Surprise Team”, since the 04-06 Cardinals won more games than any other team in baseball over those 3 years.
Also in the WS, not “everything can happen”. Only 1 of 2 teams can win, and both teams are going to be good. Both teams would have won 85+ games, and 10 more playoffs games. Luck can only go so far.
the objective is to make the mariners in the top 10 or higher, duh
Maybe one of Dave’s secret criteria last year was proximity to Alaska.
While I disagree that this whole this would be a waste of time without a precisely defined objective (I enjoyed it as it played out last year), I think you’ve made a very good suggestion about how to improve the exercise. Well said.
I think we should be weighing future talent considerably less than the other factors because of the sheer uncertainty involved. Availability of financial resources could easily sweep aside a weakness in the farm system and a strong baseball ops department could identify valuable fixes.
I had a near diatribe about this below, but even predicting future financial resources is a crapshoot. At least, in certain markets-fair enough to say that Tampa Bay will never be a top spender and the Yankees will never be a mid-market team (perhaps I should say “never again”).
But winning increases revenue, and increased revenue leads to increased payrolls. Since we can’t predict who’s making the 2012 playoffs with anywhere near a reasonable success rate, there will always be uncertainty in terms of financial resources. Also, there’s certain cities that will respond very differently to success.
Again, there’s Tampa, who sport one of the best and most competitive teams right now, but they still can’t get sell out their games. You look at the Phillies, though-when they made the jump from mediocre to division winner, attendance and revenue skyrocketed and their payroll ballooned as well.
Here’s a serious consideration. The Pirates had the lowest payroll in baseball in 2010. I wouldn’t consider financial strength anywhere near a bonus for them. However, they do have a solid young core with Walker, McCutchen, Tabata, and Alvarez there-so good young talent and still decent prospects. They’re not winning the division in 2011, of course, but if they could surprise and make a run to the playoffs in 2012, I could easily see their payroll tripling. Watching the Steelers and Penguins, you know that Pittsburgh fans will support a winner, and if you put them in a pennant race, people will show up. It might not happen immediately, since the Pirates have been bad for a long time, but give them a team that stays in first place through a significant portion of the season and their attendance will jump. Pittsburgh isn’t a baseball town, clearly, but give fans any reason to show and believe, and I think they will get quickly behind it. Having a beautiful stadium also helps.
Guess the point that I’m trying to make here is that financial strength is not static. It’s easy to think it is, since the same team has spent a very long time as the stop spender, and some others have been in the bottom for a very long time. For some markets, regardless of the results, there isn’t going to be much movement.
However, three years ago, it would have been hard to predict the Phillies becoming a financial power while the Dodgers have essentially become a mid-market spender. There is some significant movement in financial status even while certain markets remain fixed.
I read “Financial strength” as something more than current payroll. More like “The ability to have future ability to spend, assuming a certain level of success (equal amongst all teams).” I realize it’s a slightly tortured definition, but I think it meets the basic expectation of the poll.
Payroll and present talent can be measured with a fair degree of objectivity. Future talent and baseball ops skill can’t.
Whether or not the latter two are “equally important” in the abstract, we would be foolish not to regress them more heavily to the mean because of relative poverty of quality information.
Masochist.
I don’t have set percentages for any of these four categories but I do know which I would give more weight to.
1) Baseball Operations (The Brains)
This is the most important category by far. It’s the brains of the organization. I takes its financial resources to manage present talent to win now, and to manage future talent to help keep the Major League team competitive for the long haul.
Unfortunately, it’s also the toughest to determine since there’s no logical tangible measurement. You’re basically stuck with determining their philosophies with the things they say and the things they do. A GM can literally look smart one minute and dumb the next (Hi, Tony Reagins!). Not to mention Baseball Operations extends beyond the GM so it contains a bunch of moving parts.
2) Financial Strength (The Fuel)
I’m having trouble determining where financial weight goes but after thinking about it, I’d put it as slightly more important than talent (I originally voted less so). I think the key to this aspect is not only volume but efficiency. You could have +$100 million payroll but if it’s tied up in bad contracts it hardly does the organization much good. But just as weak is having only $35-$40 Million to work with. The Rays have shown that they can do good things with limited finance but just about everything has to work successfully which tough. Not to mention their farm system has to work overtime to keep the main team competitive. Otherwise, gotta have money to ensure good health.
3 & 4) Present and Future Talent (The Engine)
This is the end product. I think they should carry the same weight and should be tied for 3rd most important but it certainly shouldn’t be seen as the least important. Without talent, you can’t win. If the team is starting from rock bottom in both aspects then it’s going to take a while to build the system up to something worthwhile. Naturally, teams with a good present and future talent are nice and healthy. Some organizations with GMs who’ve gotten slammed regularly have shown skills to pump out future talent (Hello Dayton Moore. You too Brian Sabean!). If anything, talent level gives us another look at how Baseball Operations handle things.
I agree, but brains is relative to capital as well. What might be smart for the Yankees or Red Sox might be stupid for the Rays. After further reading of your response, I assume you would consider that, though.
I like the objective nature of the rankings, but I do have reservations. I understand this is probably mainly to satisfy the angry mob that disagree with the way it shakes out, but I think their are some serious issues that a simple weighting system won’t accurately address, namely:
Weighting of current talent vs. future talent. Should a team that’s “going for it” by jettisoning future talent to acquire current talent be penalized? How do you accurately rank this, especially when we already know that the benefit for a team acquiring more wins (especially int he 90+ range) increases, justifying spending more to acquire that talent. Shouldn’t an organization get rewarded for accurately assessing it’s current talent level and making the correct risk vs. reward calculation?
Similarly if a team drastically overrates their prospects of win now, should they be penalized?
I’m not certain that a simple weighting system can account for this. I think even if we define the question as simply “odds of winning a world series in the next X years” or something, that is still problematic. A good “organization” should really be able to accurately asses where they are, and the correct course of action given that. And yes I understand that makes the rankings almost impossible. But it makes it fun to talk about.
Financial strength is the ability to fix your mistakes (Irabu). Orginizational strength is the ability to minimize your mistakes (Francour). If both of the previous are strong any issues with current and future talent can be corrected.
AKA: as a Cubs fan I envy Boston.
Financial strength cannot count for more than 49%?
I voted, but the evaluation is (and must be) subjective. The rating in each category can easily be manipulated (and will be, even if uninentially) to get the result that the analyst wants.
I feel very queasy about finances being an aspect of the rating. That really only makes sense if owners, fans and the media market are considered as part of “the organization.”
How could finance not be a part of it? If you hold everything else equal, the Yankees are still much better off than the Royals due to financial strength and flexibility.
I like this as an improvement to the organization rankings, but I still feel like this objective analysis needs a “goal.” How do we define organizational success? Is it ticket sales, is it winning percentage, is it postseason appearances, is this World Series wins? This is still the most crucial thing to making a good organization, and it might be some combination of all the above things.
Finance is THE aspect and has been since Babe Ruth.
There are very few instances where a great player goes under-rated. Perhaps Pujols is the classic example.
But, at this point, everyone pretty much knows who the best prospects and stars are … only very few can afford them, let alone afford 3 of them in a single off-season.
Financial clout also allows one to easily erase horrific mistakes. Bad contract?
The Kansas City Royals cannot make the KC area’s population quadruple. There is a HUGE difference between 9 million people in the NE region, and 1.5 M in the midwest. Not just the difference in population size, but area wealth.
Finance is like the “natural ability” of athletes, it trumps everything. I was shocked that Finance can only be 49% of the equation. It’s more than that, IMO.
To your first paragraph, I reply that this is supposed to be about “organizational rankings,” not which team is most likely to succeed. The teams in New York will always have more money and usualy be more successful than the teams in tiny markets, but that doesn’t mean their organizations are better, does it?
I agree wholeheartedly with your second paragraph implication that a more specific definition of what a “successful organization” means is needed for more objectivity and even better subjectivity.
Well, if it’s not about “most likely to succeed”, then the rankings are simply “who does Fangraphs like the most”.
so expect the twins and mariners to be inordinately high…
Baseball operations seems like a completely subjective measure. How would one quantify this? Isn’t it just an opinion? To me, this should be the least important.
The other thing about Baseball Ops is that it’s the one category that can be easily overhauled from one season to the next without sacrificing in other areas. A team can add present talent at the cost of financial flexibility or future talent, and there’s a limit to how much future talent can be added without sacrificing current talent. If the front office isn’t working, though, it can be replaced quickly without sacrificing any talent or much money.
Finances are the other extreme. 10 years from now, any team in baseball could conceivably have the most talent (present or future) or the best GM, but the Royals and the Pirates won’t compete with the Yankees or Red Sox when it comes to spending power. In that aspect, money really is king when it comes to very long term outlook.
That said, I’d shy away from putting too much emphasis on either the operations and the finances: the former because it’s both the most subjective and the most rapidly replaceable, and the latter mainly because it would make for a much less interesting list.
I would like to echo what WilsonC says in regards to the replacability of Baseball Ops. To use Seattle as an example, their resources combined with Jack Zduriencik made their ranking last year defendable; but what if these rankings were done in 2008?
I don’t know if there are 30 Jack Zdurienciks out there (and I don’t mean to suggest that Jack Zduriencik is the best GM in baseball), but I’d be shocked if the Fangraphs community didn’t believe that there were plenty of worthy potential GMs that would improve many teams baseball operations. And every team has the resources to do this at any time.
This is why, unless the rankings are only looking at the next few years, I would suggest giving the smalles weight, by far, to Baseball Ops.
I don’t agree with WilsonC regarding finances however. Uninteresting or not, I think it plays a huge role.
Money plays an enormous role. Outside of the short-term success which is based mainly on current talent, I think financial strength trumps all the other categories combined, and it’s not really close. You’d probably get a pretty solid ranking just by looking up the franchise valuations and then adjusting teams upward and downward within their financial grouping based on their current talent for contenders, and future talent for non-contenders. The Yankees would be the default number one team every year regardless of any personnel, and the only teams that could see real movement on the list would be the cluster in the middle.
That’s worthwhile to look at as an study on baseball economics, but it’s putting most of the weight on the market and the brand, which are don’t have a lot of room to fluctuate. To give finances proper weight, you’d either need to have 30 market studies that have relatively little to do with baseball, or a thousand words on baseball that doesn’t reflect the ranking.
Ultimately, I think the crux of this series comes down to the decision of how much focus is put on an organization’s raw financial power. If you want to weigh it based on its true importance to an organization, it needs to be the foundation of the series. If, instead, you’d prefer to focus on the human assets present and future, then the huge advantage of high revenue teams needs to be minimized.
After a really bad move, it’s often speculated that the owner was leaning on the GM to “make a splash.” In that case, the real decision-maker is a lot harder to replace. The owner might fire the GM, hire an even smarter one, and tell him what to do.
this kind of “analysis” is just adding confusion. there are two standards at work here, and you linearly weight them? what the fuck is that.
organizational resources vs organizational ability are two interesting questions, a mixture of both is a confused picture.
Yep, this is pretty much a different way of saying what I said above. It’s apples and oranges until you have a defined set of criteria, then you can use the same denominator of “X type of success in Y years”, and you can add up your apples and oranges to get this ranking.
Over/Under on Mariners ranking this time: 10
Ill bet the overall rating is much lower. (as in, closer to 17). Want to make a friendly wager?
clearly you are not well acquainted with dave cameron…
I would LOVE to see a review of the 2010 rankings.
I think financial strength is a redundant category. If its used wisely it should show up in the other 3 anyways. If they use it on minor leaguers then they should have good future talent, if they use it to sign Albert Pujols then they should get credit for that in next years org rankings, after they’ve signed him. I believe the rankings should be a snapshot of the personnel in the organization as it is right now and their chance at being a successful team over each of the next 3 years or so. It would be useless to project farther than that since the rankings are redone each year anyway. As such I would weight current talent the most followed by minor league talent also giving near major league ready prospects a little more weight within that category. Baseball ops would be mostly a tiebreaker for me because like financial strength I think it show up mostly in the talent that has already been acquired. As far a what success is, I would say being a top 10 team or something just because I don’t want to penalize teams for their division.
Financial wealth also gives a team the ability to dramtically alter their standing in a single offseason.
[1] NYY acquired the top 3 free agents of in one offseason.
[2] BOS acquired the two best players in this past off-season.
That wasn’t brains, analysis, intelligence … that was pure financial clout.
The problem with stating that financial clout is so important, and again, it is THE factor … is that it reduces the importance of the aspect that this sites and others like this one value the most.
Take a look around there a lot of “dumb” GMs and managers making the playoffs and better every year.
We also need to get past the idea that “future talent” is a sign of GM intelligence. Isn’t that more of a result of “sucking for a decade”?
This thing seems FUBAR’d from the start.
Malcom Gladwell recently wrote a great article on ranking in the New Yorker. Look it up. You are probably better off rating them subjectively or across 1 category.
Future talent HAS to be last. There are way too many prospect busts.
Which teams will be better in the future:
Finance: A+
Ops: B
Current Talent: B
Future Talent: D
or
Finance: D
Ops B
Current Talent: B
Future Talent: A+
Give me the first option every single year. Future talent should be 10%.
I forgot to mention that I think Finance is at least equal to Ops and Current Talent….maybe more.
Of course, future talent means more than just prospects, clearly. I mean, look at the Red Sox, just for example. They have a ton of guys signed to long term deals who, yes, will help them compete this year, but will also help them compete over the next 3-4 years as well. Pedroia, Youkilis, Beckett, Lester, Gonzalez, Crawford; all of those guys have to be considered “future talent” since their futures are bound to the organization. I’m not going to rate the Orioles’ future talent higher than the Red Sox just because they have better prospects because those prospects are very unlikely to be better than players which I already know will be in Boston in 2013-14.
Could it be that it really is impossible to use the same weights across the board?
Look at it like this, financial strength would be vastly important for a team with weak future talent. But future talent is far more important for a team without financial strength. That argues that either they’re all equal, or that the returns from other areas decrease the stronger a team is in any given area.
I guess, just in short the difference between two teams with A financial strength with future talent of A and C would be less than those teams if their financial strength was only C.
I think if you want to really do this objectively, you need to stick to financial strength, current talent, future talent.
These are three things that can be measured objectively and are not independent of baseball ops.
baseball ops is, however, entirely subjective and highly susceptible to bias.
Come up with a way to objectively combine financial information, projected WAR of current talent weighted by length of team control, and some way to project future talent value like # of baseball America A, B, and C prospects and you will go a long way into building an objective system.
Once you come up with a way to generate a value # for each of these three things (which wouldn’t be that hard) then we can argue about which is more important.
Bah! Bah across the board.
Dave, please change the intent of these rankings. I would rather have the clubs rated for how well they perform in areas that they control. Don’t rank clubs based on absolute likelihood of present and future success; give rankings based on likelihood of meeting and exceeding expectations. A relative ranking similar to one of my favorite measures–marginal dollars per marginal win–is simply better.
Financial clout is generally out of the organization’s control. Listing the teams by market size is a waste of time. What control the team has over it’s revenue is mostly a byproduct of the other categories. My weight: 15%.
Baseball operations is measurable enough. Marginal wins / marginal dollar over the last few years. WAR comparisons after recent trades. Rate teams favorably for getting extra picks in drafts. Rate medical staffs for preventing and rehanging injuries. Weight: 25%.
Current talent is quite measurable. Objectively compare a bunch of projection systems’ ratings of each MLB roster. Weight: 40%.
Future talent is subjective, but we can objectively consider third-party opinions. Use Baseball America rankings. Use projection systems’ ratings of prospects. However, prospects are not predictable enough to put too much stock in them. Weight: 20%.
Using the eyeball test, I’m more impressed with Tampa Bay and Minnesota for example than the Yankees. They’re certainly less likely to win going forward, but that doesn’t matter that much.
You did a much better job of expressing what I was trying to say farther up about financial strength. It is largely not under team control and therefore does not indicate a better organization. Again, a better definition of what the organizational rankings mean would be helpful.
Finance is the big item there. It can fix all else. It can buy players, it can buy GM and other office people.
And, the LACK of a finance, can be equally crippling.
Finance will make you make odd decisions. Example (but, it did work out well). Remember the draft when Mark Prior went head to head with Joe Mauer for first place in the draft? Minnesota had that pick. They didnt have the money for Mark Prior. They didnt draft the “sure thing” pitcher, “settling” for local kid Mauer.
Yes, in hindsight that pick made sense. BUT, it was driven by the finances. That said, Finances are so pervasive, so.. intertwined with the rest of the categories that it HAS to be >50%. It is THE TEAM (onfield, scouting, frontoffice, execs, contract offers and benefits in them, etc etc).
Dave, I honestly think you need to abort this attempt to add objectivity into your rankings. Not everything that’s written, even from a sabermetric slant, has to be purely objective. You’re still relying on scouting reports and prospect rankings, which are an inefficient science, and it’s impossible to set up a model which is going to perfectly what a team’s future financial strength is going to be. Quick, dirty example, Atlanta was among the highest payrolled teams from 1993-2003, but they’ve spent 7 years hovering around a $90 million payroll, while Philadelphia’s spending has gone from being in the bottom half of the league 7 years ago to being a top 5 payroll.
And you can see an interesting story being told with the Phillies’ payroll-they went out and spent some money in 2004-2005 on guys like Thome, Kevin Millwood, Eric Milton, Billy Wagner in an attempt to build a winner, but they failed to make the playoffs and attendance didn’t rise enough to support that level of spending. The product wasn’t good enough. But then they win the NL East in 2007, and their attendance shoots up-Phillies fans were all really willing to support a good product when they got it, and as a result, they’ve been able to increase their spending as their revenues have increased while they’ve won a World Series and four straight division titles. Now they’re easily in the top 5 in terms of attendance, with a corresponding payroll, but 5 years ago you wouldn’t have considered financial strength an extreme benefit of the Phillies organization.
And you can’t predict what will happen in another 5 years, with the Braves and Nationals amassing some quality young talent. If the Phillies fail to win the East in 2012, do the fans lose interest and the revenue dries up? I can’t predict one way or another, but if it does, financial flexibility for 2013 becomes a huge weakness for the Phillies that year as they’ve already got $80 million guaranteed to four players.
Plus, there’s even degrees to this stuff. I mean, in terms of financial strength, there’s the Yankees, then there’s everybody else. People might say financial strength is only 25% of a teams’ success, or even 30%, but in the Yankees’ case, they’re so far ahead of everybody else in that regard that their relative financial strength has to be considered more than 30% of their team value.
Additionally, it’s hard for those of us on the outside of the discussions and thought processes to know exactly what organizational rankings are designed to say. Is it telling us just how relatively good or bad you think a team is going to be over the next 3 years? 5? Or is it more about how valuable the franchise is monetarily over a certain period of time? I mean, I think the Cardinals’ chances at winning a pennant over the next three years maybe not be as good as the Brewers’ or Phillies’, but in terms of financial value, they’re a much better bet to remain stable and strong in Forbes’ franchise values.
Are we predicting the team that’s going to win the most games in the next stretch of years, or the most likely to win at least one championship, or most likely to win multiple championship? I think the Braves will win more total games over the next 4-5 seasons than the Phillies do with their aging core, but the Phillies have a better chance to win a championship over that stretch because they’re very strong this year. If the Phillies win a championship and then have 4 mediocre years, and the Braves are a playoff or fringe playoff team for 5 years, which team do I place higher in my organizational rankings? Without knowing what I should value more, I can’t tell you how to weigh the four categories.
And I think it’s absolutely fine to keep these things fairly obscure and subjective. It’s hard to pin down those things exactly, so just keep your own council and make your rankings, but be sure to include the caveat that they are not an exact science. They make a good conversation piece, so just use them as such without pretending to have figured everything out perfectly. The cumulative wisdom and knowledge of the FanGraphs’ writing staff is sufficient that the vast majority of your readership will at least agree with the shape of your rankings, even if they’re debating over the minutiae. It’s clear enough that Houston isn’t a better organization than Tampa, and that Pittsburgh isn’t better than the Yankees. Just go with your guts, get a fair consensus, and offer them as a debate piece.
I just put the baseball ops and present talent at 30-39%, and future talent and revenue at 10-19%. I think if you have a good baseball ops and strong present talent you can succeed (giants, twins), but teams can succeed with low payrolls (rays) and flounder with high ones (mets). Future talent is nice, but the prospects are very unpredictable and the last team with a good farm system (mid 2000s d-backs) haven’t done as well as predicted. Baseball ops is good for everything except payroll, and present talent gauges a teams on field succes, the two most important things for an organization
20/40/30/10 is probably what I would do.
Baseball ops should have a low weighting (no more than 10%) because it can’t be measured. It is inherently subjective and I don’t see how you can derive a meaningful objective measure for it. There are factors to consider (i.e., scouting department, success of developing players, latin american operations, etc) but how do you measure them in a way that would be meaningful? And remember, last spring Jack Z was a genius, while Drayton Moore and Brian Sabean were idiot GMs. Now, Sabean has a championship, Moore has the best stockpile of minor league talent, while the Mariners quickly went from frontrunners in the AL West to needing to rebuild.
Financial strength should count for 25% and should be measured this time around. Factors could be (1) population within 60 minutes of ballpark, (2) avg attendance over past 5 years, (3) avg attendance over best 5 yrs of last 20 (if the last 5 years have been down years, but in the no-to-distant past the market has shown a willingness to support the team, it should be factored in), (4) local TV and radio markets based on past ratings, (5) corporate sponsorship, (6) stadium deals, (7) value assigned to each team by Forbes, and (8) financial position of owner.
Future talent should also count for 25%. Future talent should not include only players who still qualify as rookies (as with most prospect lists), but should also include recent graduates who no longer qualify as rookies, but have not realized their potential yet, since they will be undervalued in terms of present talent. I would have given a higher weighting for future talent, but since so many prospects never actually make it, you don’t want to elevate a teams ranking too high based on players who may never wear the uniform of that team.
That leaves 40% for present talent. This gets the highest weighting since it is the most measurable. I would include (1) highest single season WAR, (2)accumulated WAR, (3) remaining seasons of team control, (4) the player’s contract as a % of his team’s payroll and (5) certain other peripherals depending on the role the player has on the team.
Especially if you remove the GM’s name/reputation, and just look at the moves made and the resulting value.
Throw in that so many of the reputed “bad GMs” are in the playoffs and winning titles each year, I think that makes it “unimportant to say the least.”
I don’t think anyone highly rates the GMs of NYY, TEX, SFG, STL, PHL, LAA, LAD, and yet they’re often the most successful teams.
Let’s just give it to the Red Sox as being the best combination of [1] Baseball Ops, [2] Financial Clout, [3] Present Talent, and [4] Future Talent and call it a day.
A more interesting activity might be to analyze, in depth, each team in regards to these 4 categories, with an emphasis on what they can control and what they cannot.
Why not simply measure the “success” of each team over the last 5 years to determine this question?
Because the dumb guys win too much.
Honestly, I think last year’s overall rankings were done quite well aside from a couple exceptions:
1. Baseball Operations: The Mariners were obviously the most controversial ranking last year, both before the season and after they failed to perform. Ultimately it was a middling team with a high-risk core and without a deep foundation of young talent, with a rating largely based on an extremely optimistic view of a front office with a limited track record. They’d made some sharp moves, certainly, but I think some of the roster construction issues were overlooked. The glut of warm bodies at the DH and 1B positions, for example – This was a team with aspirations to contend, a projectably poor offense, and a lot of risk already, going into the season with marginal talent at positions where there was an abundance of average players available for cheap.
Solution: Recognize that it’s a highly subjective category, and that it’s easy to overvalue a GM when an organization’s front office goes from “bad” to “good”. Rather, I’d use this more to look at the current “efficiency”, so to speak. How many bad contracts are there? How many bargain ones? Are there any easily fixable holes that aren’t being addressed? Are there reasonably priced fallback solutions? Are there roster redundancies? As a front office prove itself, it’ll show in the efficiency.
2. Divisional Strength – I’d prefer to see the rankings ignore divisions altogether. It’s easy to look at a team like the Jays and see that they’re in a loaded division, due to three teams near the top of the rankings, but it tells us more about the team itself to see how it stacks up against the field. If it’s counted, though, it should be applied consistently. The Mariners last year got a bonus for a winnable division, whereas the Phillies were ranked lower than expected with no apparent adjustment for their winnable division. At least one of the top three teams was guaranteed to be out of the postseason, whereas the Twins had a much stronger lead on the other contenders in the division.
Solution: Either use a criteria that consistently applies divisional strength (such as expected postseason appearances over the next X years) or a division independent criteria (looking at short term and long term team quality, regardless of the competition).
3. Confusion in what the rankings mean – What time frame are we looking at? Are we looking at franchise value, or personnel? Are we looking at a team’s ability to get the most out of its circumstance, or an absolute measure of the team’s likelihood of winning a championship? What’s the timeframe of “Future Talent”? How much do you weigh current talent under control for a while versus prospects in Future Talent? If a team’s present roster is expensive but has contracts expiring, do you count the flexibility gained toward the future talent, or go only with the personnel in the organization already?
Solution: The discussion here shows that there’s a number of ways to approach this task. You won’t please everyone with the method you choose. The key is to choose a method and clearly define what you’re doing.
Overall: Last year’s approach was fine for the most part, but make sure to define the criteria better, stick to a consistent approach for divisional strength, and try to reduce the bias when looking at the front offices.
In response to neuter your dogma – I basically just did that for the past 10 years. Using attendance figures, there are 9 ‘large markets’ and 8 ‘small markets’ (according to some random website near the top of google). After isolating these groups I just compared cumulative team WAR for the decade.
CHC – 17th in WAR
NYY – 3rd in WAR
BOS – 1st in WAR
LAD – 21st in WAR
SEA – 6th in WAR
LAA – 8th in WAR
PHI – 2nd in WAR
NYM – 22nd in WAR
DET – 23rd in WAR
This group has averaged being roughly the 11.5th best team in the league by WAR on a yearly basis, and it has won 1/2 of the titles with 30% of the teams.
The 8 smallest markets
Pitt – 29th in WAR
Oak – 12th in WAR
Fla – 14th in WAR
SD – 16th in WAR
TB – 13th in WAR
Minn – 7th in WAR
Cleve – 11th in WAR
Balt – 25th in WAR
for an aggregate position of 15.75.
A few observations I note
1) Money does not buy success, or the Dodgers Mets Tigers and Cubs would be better. It does mask failures somewhat, or the above teams would look like the Pirates and Orioles.
2) It is possible to field a team which is reasonably competitive for little money.
3) When trying to win a championship you need to get very lucky or have a very high payroll, though the overall correlation between playoff appearances and payroll is not tremendously strong.
4) Teams in small markets need to do what TB essentially did and pick a year, raise the payroll for that one season to compete for a WS title, and hope it works.
Basically, is the purpose of an organization to win games or to win titles? Your $$ answer will hinge on that. By my reckoning, the aggregate ordering should be Current Talent, Baseball Ops. Money, Future Talent.
As I have also tried to point out, Financial strength of an organization is not a fixed value.
Over the past decade, you’ve seen the Phillies rise from being among the lower half (really, lower third at one point) in terms of payroll to being a top 5 spender. Over that same time, the Dodgers have bone from being a top 5 payroll to essentially a mid-market team. Some of this the ownership and their willingness/financial flexibility to spend. The McCourt divorce is an obvious off-field factor that’s affected the Dodgers, but the Phillies have largely reaped the benefits of their on-field success and re-invested their increased revenue into an increase in spending. Atlanta has had an ownership change and a decrease in attendance and has dropped from also being a top 5 spender to a mid-market team. The Rangers are spending $30-$40 million less on their payroll than they did at the beginning of the decade. Detroit was running in the bottom third in terms of payroll until about 4 years ago.
Rather than arbitrarily assigning cities to column A and column B and then determining how successful they’ve been, it’s probably worthwhile to see if there’s an actual correlation between dollars spent (probably above a certain baseline) and WAR. Trying to lazily disprove the financial relationship of WAR to $$ isn’t going to help much, here.
JMS, I understand your argument but I don’t entirely agree with your findings. Even though, as you point out, the aggregate positions of the “large market” teams isn’t significantly greater than the “small market” ones, it is interesting which teams are 1, 2 and 3. I’m curious as to why you excluded the mid-market teams and it would be interesting to see an analysis of all 30 teams. Also, attendance is merely a factor since there are other revenue streams and attendance might not even be the most important anymore. I also don’t believe that cummulative WAR paints the whole picture. It is a good factor to include but you can be competetive and have lots of WAR on your team and not make the post-season. WAR is nice, but number of post-season berths is more important. The bottom line is this: a number of organizations have shown the ability to put together a competitive team on a low budget, but how many can put together winning teams year after year without having to go through a rebuilding process. Small market teams are at a distinct disadvantage and financial strength is a huge factor. I don’t believe in a salary cap or in trying to create a fairer playing field, I’m only saying that it is folly to downplay the importance of financial strength.
Financial ability also allows teams to go over-slot more often in drafting future talent … And on a continual basis.
If the smallest/worst teams always got the best players in the draft, it would be a non-issue.
We also see this in international signings. Recently we have seen more teams spend on draft and international players, and I think this is one area where advanced analysis and deep research has made a major impact. But even then we all know that someday most of KC and PIT current talent will be playing elsewhere once free agency arrives.
To Bronnt – for 2010 the top 10/btm 10 teams are as follows (I used overall WL record position as opposed to WAR slottings because it is quicker and will produce a similar overall sketch
1. NYY – 3/30 30. Pitt – 30/30
2. Bos – 10/30 29. SD – 8/30 t
3. CHC – 23/30 28. Oak – 15/30 t
4. Phi – 1/30 27. Tex – 8/30 t
5. NYM – 20/30 26. Fla – 16/30t
6. Det – 15/30 t 25. Ari – 28/30
7. CHW – 11/30 24. Cle – 24/30t
8. LAA – 16/30 t 23. Wash – 24/30t
9. Sea – 29/30 22. Tor – 12/30
10. SF – 5/30 21. TB – 2/30
The top set has 6 1st division teams, the bottom set has 5 1st division teams. It seems like having excessive money is a real asset, but after the real tier 1a spenders the correlation (at least based on 2010) drops off a cliff. And as for the Pirates, they just need to stop being managed by stupid people.
I tried doing this myself, it’s a lot of work and hard to be accurate.
I don’t think you should use stuff directly weighted the same for each team. The Royals, unless Kansas City booms, will NEVER have the buying power of the Yankees. Never. For some teams it’s not even profitable to win consistently (assuming the near impossibility of constantly replenishing min wage prospects that it would take to do so).
If you could somehow weigh the team in proportion to their city size, I think that’d be a better indication of “how good” a team is. Unless you’re speaking in absolute terms, in which the richest teams automatically win. I say that because let’s say team A is filthy rich and has no farm system, and team B is poor and has the best farm system, team A will still win. Team A finds free agents that used to be top prospects, and team B loses all their prospects.
It’s why I’m never impressed with the Yankees. With their resources, they should win 95 games every year and win a World Series at least every 3 years. I AM impressed with teams like the Twins and Cardinals (even though their markets are bigger than people think).
That’s just me though, I’m a Yankee hater. To me saying that the Yankees are a great organization is like saying a guy who starts a game of monopoly with twice as much money as everyone else and wins 1/5 times is a good monopoly player. There is nothing impressive about winning when you have the advantage.