By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College
The Atlanta Braves took a major step forward in the 2026 season, a bounce back season from their 2025 stumble. In their return to their winning ways, the Cobb County-based club retook the National League East Division for the first time since 2023, overcame the Philadelphia Phillies franchise that had stymied them since Atlanta’s 2021 World Series Title, and battled the Los Angeles Dodgers in four close NLDS games.
Yet the team’s resurgence has Braves fans wondering if there could have been more. Certainly, new manager Walt Weiss proved himself in his debut season, rewarding the franchise’s decision to stay in house and ignore those who demanded an outsider be at the helm of the team. And the decision to retain many of the assistant coaches in pitching, bullpen, etc. was a wise one.
To look at what it takes to win in Major League Baseball (MLB), I went to Spotrac to look at what’s correlated with baseball wins, including the average age of the team, and how big the budget of the team is. But unlike most who look at the overall money, I used Spotrac’s data to break down the salary into healthy and unhealthy players. The results were stunning.
First of all, I ranked all the teams in the number of wins, from the Milwaukee Brewers and L.A. Dodgers at the top, followed by the Tampa Bay Rays and the Atlanta Braves, who finished fourth, a game ahead of the New York Yankees. Then I calculated the average age of the players. Perhaps the Braves were too young, or too old?
The youngest teams, in order, were Washington, St. Louis, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Cleveland, the L.A. Angels, the N.Y. Mets, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Only two made the playoffs, though Pittsburgh just snuck in with a winning record.
The Braves were the fourth oldest, with the Dodgers, Cubs and Phillies being the oldest. Behind Atlanta were the Yankees, Kansas City, Texas and Tampa. Miami, San Diego and Boston rounded out the rest. Of these 11, eight made the playoffs. The Pearson Correlation Coefficient for wins was 0.476463, a strong significant positive relationship with age (p<.01). Older can be wiser and youth movements can be overrated.
Similarly, I looked at salary. Atlanta was sixth in payroll, behind the Mets, Dodgers, Yankees, Phillies and Toronto, ahead of the Cubs, Astros, Padres and Red Sox. All but the Mets and Blue Jays made the playoffs. To win, you’ve got to open up the purse, right? Well, the Pearson Correlation Coefficient for salary and wins was only 0.294677, just missing statistical significance (p<.10), in a more gray area for being confident in the correlation. That was surprising.
So I broke it down by salary spent on healthy players (Atlanta ranks seventh). The Pearson Correlation Coefficient was a robust 0.509023 (p<.01) for money spent on active personnel on the roster. But when you look at injured players who are still on the payroll, you begin to see Atlanta’s Achilles’ Heel.
San Francisco paid the most for hurt players (nearly $50 million more than second place on the list) followed by Toronto, Baltimore, Houston, the L.A. Angels, Boston, Atlanta, Minnesota, the N.Y. Yankees and Arizona, with Oakland, Colorado, and Texas on the list as well.
The Braves and Yankees were the only ones to win a division series and playoff series with this kind of dead weight against their salary. The Pearson Correlation Coefficient for wins and paying for injured players was a negative relationship (-0.28308, p<.10). Without exceptions like Atlanta and the N.Y. A.L. team, it would have been a significant relationship at the 95% level of confidence.
Atlanta made it in spite of the trends. Without these injuries and what they cost the team, it’s likely the team would have challenged the Dodgers and Brewers for hosting an NLDS and NLCS.
If the Braves hope to make it to the NLCS and take another World Series Title, they’ve got to solve the injury bug in 2027. The team was able to patch together enough starting pitching behind Chris Sale, with an entire rotation on the IL (Strider, Schwellenbach, Waldrep, Lopez and Elder or Smith-Shawver sometimes). There were missing bullpen pieces and getting a second catcher while Sean Murphy was hurt. Finding ways to get the players healthy or good replacements (Tyler Mahle, Martin Perez, Grant Holmes) is the key to Atlanta’s third W.S. Trophy next year.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu or on “X” at @johntures2. His first book “Branded” a thriller novel where corporate greed, media manipulation and academic intrigue collide in a deadly game of product placement, has been published by the Huntsville Independent Press (https://www.huntsvilleindependent.com/product-page/branded). His second novel, “Independent Thought,” about a third-party candidacy that brings America to its knees, is published by HIP (https://www.huntsvilleindependent.com/product-page/independent-thought).