In an earlier discussion, I took a look at the correlation between TV Market Size and MLB Club Payroll. An interesting question came up in the comments section. The question was this - Does payroll matter in regards to wins? I changed the question slightly to this - Do high payroll teams have more postseason appearances?

As a reminder, I am using the End-of-Year payrolls as the sorting value. This number can vary significantly from Opening Day payrolls as teams make trades for the final push. I have data from the Biz of Baseball going back to 1999, so it is a good reflection of modern baseball.

There is too much data to examine properly in one post, so I am starting with the National League.

To make it into the postseason a team only needs to have a better record than the other teams in its division. Because of that, I only compared the division winner’s payroll to other teams in the division.

To gain the wild card, a team must have a better record than all other teams in the league (except for the division winners). So, I sorted the wildcard teams by their payroll rank in the league after excluding the division winners.

In the charts below, you will see three items: the year, the team that won the division, and that team’s payroll rank. To measure the division winners, I sorted them by their payroll rank within their division. A division winner with a "1" means it also had the highest team payroll in the division. To further labor the point, a "2" means the second-highest payroll, and a "3" means the third-highest payroll.

For this last chart, I list the wild card winners and their rank within all non-division-winners in their league.

By my count, the teams with the highest payroll won their division an impressive 41% of the time. Throw in the second-highest payroll, and the figure climbs to 69%.

Wildcards seem to be the great equalizer, at least in the National League. No top spenders made the cut, and the #2 spender was only successful in 3 tries out of 13. There also appears to be a "lightning in a bottle" effect with the 2003 Marlins and 2007 Rockies.