BOCA RATON, Fla. (AP) – Terry Ryan looked around the room, where most of the major league general managers were gathered.
“There’s really no excuse for all us here not to be competitive,” the Minnesota Twins GM said Tuesday.
Everyone wants to be the Kansas City Royals, who won the World Series with a young, athletic team that had a payroll of $128 million at the end of the regular season, 13th among the 30 big league teams.
Kansas City won its first title since 1985 with a five-game victory over the New York Mets, who were 19th at just under $110 million.
“My favorite fun fact about the World Series is we had a small market against a big market, and the small market had a higher payroll than the big market. That’s all good from my perspective,” new baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said. “The correlation between payroll and winning going down I think is a great analytical indicator of competitive balance in the game.”