There is definitely a correlation between MLB team payroll and winning percentage, but that doesn't seem to be working for the Yankees in 2004. Maybe the answer lies in beer prices. If there is indeed a relationship between how much fans pay for beer at the ballpark and how well the home team performs, then the answer to the all the Yankees problems might be literally "at the bottom of that beer can."
Using Page 2's very unscientific ratings of all the MLB parks (including beer prices), I took a look at the relationship between how much fans paid to have a cold one and how the home team performed on the field.
Before I started this little mini-project I was guessing that teams with the bigger payrolls would in most cases also have the highest beer prices, and also win more baseball games. But that didn't turn out to be the case. Granted, you can pay as much $8 for a premium beer in Los Angeles and as little as $4.75 for a beer in Chicago (AL), but other than these two instances, beer prices showed little variation across teams. In fact, there is virtually no correlation between beer prices and winning percentage (see the table below -- it's -0.06), while as you might expect, the correlation between team payroll and winning percentage is pretty high (0.45).
Unfortunately this doesn't bode well for the Yankees. For a team that's currently struggling and looking for a quick fix, I thought this might be it (and even though they won last night, it took the late inning heroics of Ruben Sierra -- and I don't think that's something you want to come to rely on if you're a Yankee fan). As a conscientious Red Sox fan, I felt it was important to keep the AL East as competitive as possible because the last thing I would want is for the Red Sox to actually win the division and for the Yankees to go into a tailspin and finish below .500.
Team Beer $ Win Pct. Payroll Detroit $6.00 27% $59,006,941 Tampa Bay $7.00 39% $31,660,602 San Diego $7.50 40% $57,871,722 New York Mets $6.25 41% $116,253,927 Cleveland $6.00 42% $58,108,824 Milwaukee $6.00 42% $47,294,226 Cincinnati $6.25 43% $65,083,196 Texas $5.25 44% $106,277,880 Baltimore $6.00 44% $75,502,154 Colorado $6.00 46% $78,738,492 Pittsburgh $5.25 46% $62,314,723 Anaheim $6.75 48% $83,235,098 Kansas City $5.25 51% $48,475,322 Montreal $6.00 51% $45,853,889 Arizona $5.75 52% $92,665,040 Los Angeles $8.00 52% $109,248,680 St. Louis $5.75 52% $101,825,848 Philadelphia $5.75 53% $95,338,704 Chicago White Sox $4.75 53% $71,336,029 Toronto $5.50 53% $61,175,638 Houston $6.00 54% $79,946,964 Chicago Cubs $5.00 54% $86,576,763 Minnesota $5.00 56% $65,318,977 Florida $5.75 56% $63,281,152 Seattle $6.63 57% $92,268,063 Boston $5.60 59% $104,873,607 Oakland $7.50 59% $56,596,691 San Francisco $7.13 62% $100,061,211 New York Yankees $6.50 62% $180,322,403 Atlanta $5.50 62% $103,912,011 correlation: -0.06 0.45
