Every week, major sports websites such as ESPN and FOX come out with their MLB Power Rankings. The point of this is to show which teams are playing well and which teams simply are not gonna make it.
What these rankings don’t take into consideration, however, is how much money each team spent on it’s players.Therefore, I have devised a formula which takes each team’s total payroll and divides it by the number of wins they have then multiplies it by 10 million to get the teams payroll to win ratio, or PTWR for short. The lower a team’s PTWR the better because it means they are winning more games using less money.
The advantage of using the PTWR is that it prevents teams like the Yankees, who essentially buy all their talent, from unfairly dominating the rankings year in and year out.
Although some anomalies are caused by team’s being so rich (Yankees) or so poor (Pirates) that their PTWR is abnormally high or low regardless of where they are in the standings, it is a good tool for determining baseball’s true success stories, such as San Diego who has the best record in the NL despite having the leagues second lowest payroll, and it’s true failures, such as the Chicago Cubs who can’t seem to get anything done despite having the highest payroll in the NL and in all of baseball following the Yankees and Red Sox.
Note that the following numbers were calculated at the completion of yesterday’s games, so the PTWR might have changed since then depending on when you are reading this.
So, without further delay, here it is, the PTWR rankings of all 30 MLB teams.