The New York Times has an interesting chart that illustrates how well baseball teams' payrolls have translated into wins over the past decade. It's largely unsurprising -- the Red Sox do more with more, the Mets do less with more, the Marlins do more with less, and the Royals do less with less.
Chart: Yankees Are Really Good, Really Sucky
But does this chart tell us whether or not these teams are sucky? It’s a vague indicator at best. After the jump, please see my chart, which attempts to gauge the suckiness of today’s baseball teams.
I made the following two Google searches for each baseball team:
“[team name] is good” [city]
“[team name] sucks” [city]
So, for example, I entered searches for “yankees are good” “new york” and “yankees suck” “new york” and counted up the results, which I then used to make this chart.
This works under the assumption that for every person who bothers to say that you're good, approximately 1.6 people will bother to remark that you are sucky. It's a positive sign for a team to be below the diagonal line; surprisingly, the Mets are far and away the least sucky. Someone surprisingly, the most sucky teams turn out to be the Braves and Blue Jays.
Ancillary research suggests that the results skew very differently if we replace “[team] sucks” with phrases such as, “[team] is frickin’ garbage, kid,” or “[team] can kiss my dang butt.” As in most fields of research, there is plenty more to be explored.
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