I hate these moments. I'm hearing the dual voices now, you know. What about the money? What's money?

Good morning and welcome to episode 215 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from Baseball

Perspectus. I am Ben Lindbergh joined by Sand Miller. I hope you had as good a weekend as the

Astros in the Marlins who both swept the Astros in one flight. I mean I didn't because they're playing

in the Major League and I'm not. I mean it's just that the starting point is ridiculous. I had a

in fact I also had a much worse weekend than the Angels who were they actually weren't swept by

the way it's a forging wrap around series. So it's it's wrong to say that the Angels got swept. It

is correct to say that the Angels world burned to hell. Which I guess you kind of want to talk

about today. So what do you want to talk about? I wanted to ask you about two players.

We don't have to do a podcast for that Ben you could just email me. Yeah. No one else would have

gotten to hear it. And I want to talk about the so-called resource curse. So why don't I start?

All right so I wrote a piece for ESPN the magazine the premise of which was if the Angels are a

smart team and they're a rich team why aren't they a winning team and incorporates the Dodgers as

well and looks at the question of whether it is well I guess whether it's harder to win with

money now than it used to be but the pitch or I guess the the nut graph is that there is an

emergent resource curse in baseball whereby there seems to be a very little advantage to having

money. And this showed up last year really primarily when the correlation between money and wins

was the lowest it had been in the in any post expansion year in history and really like a lot

lower than than the average the average I think the correlation was somewhere in the somewhere between

point four and point five last year I think it was point one nine the average the average team over

the last 20 years that has been in the top half of payroll has won 85 games and so then the

average team in the bottom half is 177 which is a good and real difference last year the

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