How Player Payroll Plays Out In Reaching The World Series

The Fall Classic is set. With the Toronto Blue Jays besting the Seattle Mariners in Game 7 of the ALCS, we now know who will face the Los Angeles Dodgers. A recurring question for Major League Baseball is, can teams with anything other than the highest player payrolls compete in the postseason?

We have to go back nearly a month to the start of the 2025 MLB playoffs to begin answering the payroll question. On Tuesday, September 30, the playoffs kicked off with a total of 12 teams vying to win the World Series eventually. Using 40-man payroll figures from Cot’s Contracts, those that made the postseason spanned the player payroll spectrum.

Based on the system that sees the addition of the Wild Card, clubs don’t have to have high payrolls to make the MLB postseason. Out of the 30 teams in MLB for 2025, five teams ranked in the top 10 (Dodgers, Yankees, Phillies, Blue Jays, Padres), four teams ranked in the middle 10 (Cubs, Red Sox, Mariners, Tigers), and three teams ranked in the bottom 10 (Reds, Brewers, Guardians).

Below shows a breakdown of how these playoff teams made their way there through the amount they spent on player payroll.

The Wild Card Series

The Wild Card round, with its best-of-3 format, introduces enough randomness to allow teams with fairly close payrolls to have a lower-ranked team advance. Just one series saw a sweep, and that was the Dodgers winning 2-0 over the Reds, a matchup of Los Angeles’ #1 ranked $346.9 million player payroll against the $116.1 million of the Reds, who were ranked #22. But, in every instance, minus the Padres ($214.6 million, ranked #9) losing to the Cubs ($207.6 million, ranked #11), every higher-ranking payroll won their Wild Card series.

The Division Series

The Division Series, with its 5-game, 2-2-1 format, starts placing a higher premium on pitching. There were no sweeps in 2025. The way the brackets landed, all but one — the Brewers, with their $115 million player payroll ranked #23, beat the Cubs, with their $207.6 million payroll, ranked #11 — saw player payrolls closely aligned. The series between the Tigers and Mariners revealed how two well-run organizations with payrolls separated by just $3.8 million had to fight the hardest to advance. Their Game 5, 15-inning instant classic to see who advanced to the ALCS was some of the most dramatic baseball of the season.

League Championship Series

Once we get to the LCS, the 7-game format (2-3-2), we wound up with one battle for the ages in the Mariners and Blue Jays, and one where the Brewers seemed completely outmanned. For the NLCS, while a lot of focus will be on Shohei Ohtani’s incredible Game 3 performance with three home runs and 10 strikeouts – something that had never before been done – that earned him the NLCS MVP, it was largely pitching that seemed so dominant.

In the Dodgers sweep, you had Blake Snell in Game 1 go eight innings pitched, give up just 1 hit, and struck out 10. In Game 2, you had a complete game from Yoshinobu Yamamoto, giving up just 3 hits, 1 run, 1 walk, and striking out 7. It’s not until Game 3, when Tyler Glasnow goes 5.2 IP and gives up 3 hits and a run, that manager Dave Roberts really taps his bullpen. And, as mentioned, all the Dodgers did on the other side of the plate was have incredible history. So, it’s here that we see what a massive player payroll does against a team with a low payroll, yet had the best record in the regular season. Once it gets into a 7 game series, the talent factor with higher payroll teams can have a significant advantage.

In the ALCS, you had a knockdown, drag-out where the 15th-ranked payroll of the Mariners faced the #5 payroll in the Blue Jays. So, what was the difference maker here? Beyond the fact that Seattle’s 7-8-9 hitters were virtually non-existent while 6 through 9 for the Blue Jays were doing damage, it really boiled down to the bullpens on both sides. The Blue Jays’ weakness is their bullpen, but in Game 7, they were able to tap key starters in Kevin Gausman and Chris Bassitt out of the ‘pen where, beyond Mariners manager Dan Wilson going with Bryan Woo after an exceptional start by George Kirby, he opted not to pull the levers of the likes of Luis Castillo. Still, if Dan Wilson doesn’t keep Woo in after issuing a walk in the 7, it’s possible that game outcome may have been different. Keeping Woo in led to a single, and it’s there that Wilson went with reliever Eduard Bazardo, who gave up the dramatic game-winning home run to George Springer.

World Series Matchups

We don’t know the outcome… yet. The Dodgers are certainly favored to repeat – something that MLB has seen since the Yankees won three straight from 1998-2000. But the matchups show that, once again, while not every time, clubs that spend in the top third in the league have the better odds of getting to the Fall Classic. In 2024, we had the #1 and #2 payrolls in the Dodgers and Yankees. In 2023, it was the #4 ranked Texas Rangers against the #21 ranked Arizona Diamondbacks. In 2022, it was the #5 Philadelphia Phillies getting beat by the #7 Houston Astros. So, more often than not, it happens.

Does Anything Need Fixing?

If “hope” and “anything can happen in the postseason” are part of a fan’s hope and dreams, then the 12 clubs that make the postseason primarily benefit. If it’s a case of “it’s not good enough for my team to make the postseason; they have to win it all,” then the system needs to be adjusted.

If one examines how payrolls were distributed in each of the playoff rounds, the alignment of the brackets led some teams with higher payrolls to fall by the wayside. In the LDS, two clubs with payrolls of $298.1 million (Yankees) and $289.7 million (Phillies) both got knocked off.