Follow the $$$$.

In baseball, it still pays to pay

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The three franchises with the highest player payrolls in Major League Baseball just advanced to their respective league championship series, and no, this isn’t meant to make you feel better. We like upstarts; our favorite team is an upstart. But having a lot of money to throw around in pro sports really does help.

Here are your NL and AL finalists, ordered by their overall payroll rank for MLB tax-threshold purposes, per Cot's Baseball Contracts:

1st — Mets ($356.2 million)

2nd — Dodgers ($351.7 million)

3rd — Yankees ($314.8 million)

21st — Guardians ($139.7 million)

One of these things is not like the other. Cleveland, under first-year manager Steven Vogt, squeezed 92 regular-season wins out of its lower-tier payroll, and speaking of the AL Central, both the Royals (18th in payroll) and the plucky Tigers (28th) knocked off quality opponents on the road during the Wild Card round.

In general, though, money rules. As it tends to do.

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You have to go seven-deep in the MLB payroll picture before you find a team that spent a lot in 2024 but didn’t see the post-season. (The Cubs, naturally.) That is increasingly hard to do, with the expanded playoff format giving a chance to any club that remains even marginally connected to .500 baseball through the summer.

There are caveats, sure. Look at the Mets. A significant percent of their payroll is actually money still being doled out to no-longer-Mets type guys, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander among them. James McCann technically remains on the NYM payroll as well. None of these players won a game for the franchise in 2024.

Too, the highest-spending teams are generally the oldest, and that can bring complications in itself. By the average age of their players this season, the oldest teams in MLB were the Braves, Mets, Dodgers, Padres and Rangers. (The youngest were the Tigers, White Sox and Guards.) Sometimes teams are spending a lot because just enough of their players have finally hit the point in their careers, usually in their late 20s or early 30s, in which they reach arbitration or free agency — the bill finally coming due.

But in some ways, that is the point: Either having or being willing to spend a lot means you can paper over mistakes, bad contract luck or injury by making other purchases and acquisitions. That’s business, right?

The Dodgers do that, just like the Mets. The Yankees you don’t have to ask about, since they’ve been fronting this style of operation since long before George Steinbrenner was a shipbuilder.

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Because a system like this feels a little fated, folks gravitate toward the outliers as proof that you don’t have to be a Top-5 spender to win. That happens often enough to be heartwarming, and bottom-half payroll teams that made the playoffs this year included the Brewers, Royals, Orioles and Tigers.

But at a time when local MLB broadcast-rights packages are falling apart, with the league itself having to rush in and guarantee home-team TV deals for the coming year for several franchises, the increasing wealth gap between huge-market and smaller-market clubs is a genuine problem.

As ESPN reported last year, the correlation of payroll to wins is clear. The top six teams in payroll from 2017 to 2022 averaged 91 wins, up from 86 over the previous five years. And as much as folks love to hold up the Tampa Bay Rays or Moneyball-era A’s as a thumb in the eye of the system, the KC Royals remains the only team in the last 15 years to win the World Series with a bottom-half payroll.

Could Cleveland break through this year? It could happen — it just won’t change things much. Hoping for rich teams to screw up their rosters doesn’t feel like a long-term strategy, if the goal is to give more markets more chances for their fans to experience something electric.