Comparing Payroll to Winning Percentage in the MLB

A common conception would be, that the more money is invested in something, the better it will perform. In the realm of sports, this would seem to ring true. In this article, the correlation between a team's payroll and win percentage is explored. This article first peaked my interest, because I know that the Phillies had the second highest payroll and did not even make the playoffs. This article was posted in Freakonomics, a blog which was spawned from the original text Freakonomics. On this blog, hidden trends in data are explored in-depth, similar to what the book had achieved. The author, David Berri, found that this year showed that having a higher payroll did not necessarily mean a successful team. This bucked the trend from previous years. But, he did argue that it was only not statistically significant 5 out of the last 24 years. Which is an incredibly low number. Berri argues that salaries within baseball players can be inconsistent with the productivity of many rookie players. This, therefore, throws off the statistics regarding the salaries of players. Berri utilizes anecdotal evidence to refute some trends. He also appeals to logos on multiple occasions when looking into trends, and causes the reader to reevaluate the trends in data. This thought process of evaluating numbers is the reason why Freakonomics is so successful, because it attributes real life to a set of numbers. Therefore I found that the article provided a great deal of analysis on the trends between salary performance, which was the intended purpose.