The most efficient teams with regard to $/WAR are all 100+ game winners: Long Beach, Charm City, and Nashville, spending well under $2 million per WAR. The average cost of a WAR is $3.4 million; both Long Beach and Charm City are spending less than half of this.
Here the playoff teams are more widely spread, with three of the top ten teams in terms of total batting WAR failing to make the offseason. Wildcard Vancouver and division winner Mexico City rank in the bottom half of the league, albeit 18th and 19th.
The average ballclub spent 60% of their payroll on position players.
Yours truly was the big spender on batters, dropping over $100 million to put a competitive lineup on the field. This was 84% of our payroll. For that money, the Blazers offense/defense recorded 34.6 WAR, a distant second behind our nemesis, Charm City and their 42.5.
The most frugal team was San Antonio, who spent under $42 million to earn 8.1 WAR. In percentage terms, Long Beach and Rocky Mountain spent a mere 44% of their payrolls, yielding 34.3 and 21 WAR, respectively.
What have we learned? It seems that the average team allocates their payroll in a 60/40 split between position players and their pitching staff. Each position player WAR costs about $3.4 million on average, while each pitching rWAR costs about $2.7 million. On average, a team’s position players accrue 19.3 WAR and their pitching staff contributes another 15.5 rWAR. Thus, an average club totals about 35 WAR over the course of a season.
