MLB's Strangest Trend in 2023: Big-Spending Teams Aren't Winning

"You get what you pay for" is a useful saying, and we'll make a sweeping generalization that it's true more often than not.

So long as it's not applied to the 2023 Major League Baseball season, that is.

In 2022, teams generally did get what they paid for. The 12-team playoff field consisted of nine clubs—including all five of the biggest spenders—that were in the top half of the league in payroll and just three in the bottom half.

It's early yet, but what's unfolding in 2023 is basically the Bizarro World version of last year. If the season had ended with Memorial Day on Monday, the playoff field would have been split evenly between six teams in the bottom half in payroll and six teams in the top half. Of the six teams with the highest payrolls in each division, not one is in first place.

Out of the teams with the top 10 payrolls, the New York Mets ($345.5 million), San Diego Padres ($247.9 million), Philadelphia Phillies ($243.5 million), Los Angeles Angels ($215.9 million), Toronto Blue Jays ($214.1 million) and defending World Series champion Houston Astros ($190.7 million) have all put themselves in danger of falling short of the postseason.

---

What the Heck Is Going On?

As in, small picture? A whole bunch of explanations that reside on various points of spectrum with "Surprising" on one side and "Foreseeable" on the other.

Toward the latter is where you'll find the Mets. Their Justin Verlander- and Max Scherzer-led rotation looked like the best in the league coming into the year, but there were always concerns relating to its age and questionable durability. Cut to now, and their rotation leads MLB in money lost to the injured list while also ranking last in the National League in rWAR.

More toward the Surprising category is where you'll find the Padres. Their star-studded lineup looked like it would be the best in the NL, yet they now rank ahead of only the Miami Marlins in scoring.

Though Juan Soto is having a terrific year after a slow start, Xander Bogaerts and Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado (who's currently on the IL) haven't followed suit and the team's historically poor average with runners in scoring position suggests that everyone is pressing.

Elsewhere on the Surprising side are developments such as $300 million shortstop Trea Turner having a terrible debut for the Phillies, the Blue Jays getting less than expected results from guys like Alek Manoah and George Springer and the Angels not quite getting what they hoped for from their offseason play on depth.

As for you, Astros, it's on the Foreseeable side for you. Dropping $105 million on José Abreu, Rafael Montero and Michael Brantley was never a good idea, and you can't just let a guy like Verlander go unreplaced and expect there to not be any consequences.

---

How Unusual Is This?

The premise in the foreground here is the idea that the more teams spend, the more they should win. If true, there would be a perfect 1:1 correlation between payrolls and winning percentage on an annual basis.

There isn't, but the correlation can be strong. Like, say, when there was 0.62 correlation between teams' Opening Day payrolls and eventual winning percentages in 2016, or when there was a 0.59 correlation just last year.

So far in 2023, though, the correlation between payroll and winning percentage is weak. As in, 0.20 weak. That comes close to signaling no relationship whatsoever. It's also the lowest such mark of the 21st century.

The Icarus vibes are strong here. Though teams had good excuses—i.e., the success of big spenders in 2022 and favorable economic conditions—to go on the $3.7 billion free-agent spending spree that preceded this season, all but one of the players who got paid is now beyond his age-26 season. Or, the season at which modern players typically hit their peak.

This is to say that, to one degree or another, the Mets, Padres, Phillies, Blue Jays, Angels and Astros made risky bets against the aging curve by pumping nearly $1.5 billion into free agency.

At the same time, the extent to which big spenders are struggling this year is also a course correction. Because spikes in 2016 and 2022 aside, the trendline for the correlation between payroll and winning percentage is slightly downward since 2000.

This is not to be confused for a sign that MLB is achieving greater parity between the lines. Chris Gilligan of FanGraphs wrote in March about how there's been substantial disparity in teams' winning percentages in recent years. Things have [shakes fist at the Oakland Athletics] not gotten better in 2023.

Nonetheless, that the haves and have-nots in terms of wins and payroll don't map neatly onto one another suggests there's still more than one way to compete.

---

What Lessons Can Be Learned Here?

For starters, all this cuts against the notion that MLB's economic reform committee is necessary.

A source posited to Evan Drellich of The Athletic in February that the "whole idea is to basically come up with a system that gets to a salary cap." Even setting aside the suddenly suspect need for such a system, it's a non-starter for the MLB Players Association anyway.

Rather than fret, baseball's lesser spenders should take solace that the standard model for them to overcome payroll disadvantages still works. As the Tampa Bay Rays, Baltimore Orioles and Arizona Diamondbacks can vouch, cultivating strong bases of homegrown talent and exploiting inefficiencies (i.e., baserunning in an era of bigger bases) can still work.

The lesson for the bigger spenders, meanwhile, shouldn't be that free agency is too risky to be worth it. As easy as it is to focus on the teams that aren't benefiting from it right now, success stories aren't hard to spot.

Big-ticket signings were instrumental in getting the Mets to 101 wins last year, and just think about how screwed the New York Yankees would be right now if they hadn't dropped $400 million on Aaron Judge and Anthony Rizzo. And while the Jacob deGrom signing is off to a rough start, the Texas Rangers wouldn't be leading the American League West without Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, Nathan Eovaldi, Jon Gray and Andrew Heaney.

And yet it's also clear that if big spenders want to attain consistency, diversifying is key.

Consider the Los Angeles Dodgers model. They've had top-five payrolls in each of the last 11 seasons and are looking to make it 11 trips in a row to the playoffs. They're obviously not averse to spending, but their player-development machine and uncanny capacity for digging up veteran gems creates a sort of talent buffer around their high-priced guys. It ensures they don't need to do everything, everywhere, all the time.

There's also the Atlanta model. Their payrolls have been trending up since 2016 not so much because they go wild in free agency—though they do dabble—but because they opt to reward their core stars. There should be more where their five straight NL East titles (not to mention their 2021 World Series championship) came from.

In other words, some ways of getting what you paid for are better than others.

---

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant. Payroll data courtesy of Cot's Baseball Contracts.