Can you buy a World Series? Here’s player payroll for each of the 12 teams that made it to the 2025 playoffs and how matchups played out.
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.
