“We're not buying players. We're buying wins.”
Billy Beane · Moneyball, 2011

Moneyball Price of a Win Index

What baseball pays for measurable performance.

Reconstructed Quote unverified

Film: Moneyball (2011)
Base year: 2002
Indexed unit: One win above replacement, at free-agent market price
Geography: United States (Major League Baseball)
Currency: USD

One win above replacement, at the free-agent market price of the day.

Value at 2002

$1.40M

Value at last verified date (2024)

$8.60M

Moneyball identified an inefficiency. Baseball responded by increasing its price.

Nominal change: +514.3%
Compound annual growth: +8.6% a year
2002 value in 2024 money: $2.44M
Real appreciation: +252.3%

Base year — The 2002 Oakland Athletics season the film depicts — not the 2011 release year. The economics being measured are the 2002 market's.

01The series

What it was worth, each year

Nominal local currency by default. Switch modes to strip out inflation, express the figure as earning time, or read it as quantity and percentage change.

Event markers

Value in the currency of the day, unadjusted.

Focus the chart and use ← → to walk the series, Home and End for the ends, Escape to clear.

Free-agent cost per win above replacementLeague-average payroll per winInterpolatedProvisional

One win above replacement, at free-agent market price — Free-agent cost per win above replacement: $1.40M in 2002, $8.60M in 2024 — an increase of 514.3% across 22 annual observations.

Did it outrun the benchmarks?

US CPI, all itemsOutran
6.1× vs 1.7×
Baseball salaries have outrun general inflation by a wide margin. Without CPI the chart flatters the sport's spending.

02Calculation

The complete equation

Not a footnote. Every step, every number, the dataset it came from and the rounding rule applied to it.

1 WAR
equals one win above a replacement-level player
WAR is the film's thesis reduced to a single tradeable unit.
$1.4M per WAR
equals free-agent price, 2002
Estimated marginal cost of a win in the 2002 free-agent market.
Source: FanGraphs
$41.9M ÷ 103 wins
equals $407K per win — Oakland, 2002
What the inefficiency was actually worth: Oakland bought wins for roughly a third of the market rate.
Source: Baseball Reference
$8.6M per WAR
equals free-agent price, 2024
The same unit, twenty-two years later.
Source: FanGraphs

Conversion — The series is already the price of one win. No conversion is applied; the currency unit is $ millions.

03Affordability

Price is only the first question

How much it cost, how much the underlying thing appreciated, and how hard it was for a person to afford — three different questions with three different answers.

What the old money buys

What the 2002 outlay of $1.40M would buy at 2024 prices.

2002 prices1 wins above replacement

2024 prices0.16 wins above replacement

The same money buys 16.3% of what it did — the rest is price.

Inflation-adjusted value

What the 2002 price is worth in 2024 money, against what the thing actually costs.

2002 price, restated$2.44M

2024 price, actual$8.60M

Real appreciation of +252.3%. This part is not inflation — One win above replacement, at free-agent market price genuinely got dearer.

04Interpretation

What drove the change

The price of a win rose roughly six-fold in nominal terms while US consumer prices rose about 75%. Almost the entire increase is real, which is unusual — most things that look like they are getting expensive are mostly just currency.

This is what an arbitraged inefficiency looks like after the fact. Oakland's advantage in 2002 was not that on-base percentage created wins; it was that nobody else was bidding for it. Once every front office ran the same regression, the discount closed and the market repriced the input.

The uncomfortable reading for the film's thesis: analytics did not make baseball cheaper to win. It made the cost of winning legible, and legible things get bid up to their value.

Universal adoption

Thirty analytics departments competing for the same undervalued skill removes the discount that made the strategy work.

Revenue growth

National and regional media rights multiplied league revenue. More money chasing the same fixed supply of wins raises the price per win.

Fixed supply

There are exactly 2,430 games and roughly 2,430 wins a season, however much anyone spends. The supply curve is vertical, which is the whole story.

Contract structure

Long deals, deferrals and pre-arbitration control mean posted payroll and true cost per win diverge — the cheapest wins in modern baseball are bought from the minor leagues, not the market.

What this index does not claim

$/WAR is an analyst estimate of a marginal free-agent price, not a figure any club publishes. Levels vary between sources; the trend does not.
The film's line is paraphrased and not yet checked against the shooting script or authorised subtitles.
2020 is excluded rather than pro-rated. A 60-game season does not have a comparable full-season price of a win.
Team payroll per win is a blunter instrument than $/WAR: it charges a club for wins it would have got from replacement-level players anyway.

05Provenance

Source ledger

Every dataset behind this page, with the adjustments applied on the way in and how gaps are treated. Last verified 31 December 2025.

Estimated free-agent cost per win above replacement — $ millions per WARFanGraphsData confidence: Reconstructed2002–2024
Publisher
FanGraphs
Date range
2002-01-01 to 2024-12-31
Geography
United States (Major League Baseball)
Frequency
annual
Original unit
$ per WAR, free-agent market estimate
Normalised unit
$ millions per WAR
Currency
USD
Adjustments
$/WAR is an estimate of the marginal free-agent price of a win, not a figure any team publishes. Different analysts reach different levels; the trend is far more robust than any single year's value.
Missing data
2020 is excluded: a 60-game season makes a full-season WAR price meaningless rather than merely noisy.
Last checked
2025-12-31
Licensing
Cited with attribution; derived estimate, not an official MLB statistic
Source
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/
League-average team payroll per win — $ millionsBaseball Reference, Lahman Database, Associated Press payroll surveysData confidence: Verified2002–2024
Publisher
Baseball Reference, Lahman Database, Associated Press payroll surveys
Date range
2002-01-01 to 2024-12-31
Geography
United States (Major League Baseball)
Frequency
annual
Original unit
$ opening-day payroll; wins
Normalised unit
$ millions of payroll per regular-season win
Currency
USD
Adjustments
Opening-day payrolls divided by the 81-win league average. Deferred money, signing bonuses and in-season acquisitions are not restated.
Missing data
2020 excluded (shortened season).
Last checked
2025-12-31
Licensing
Cited with attribution
Source
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/
CPI for all urban consumers, all items — annual average, 1982–84 = 100U.S. Bureau of Labor StatisticsData confidence: Verified1994–2025
Publisher
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Date range
1994-01-01 to 2025-12-31
Geography
United States (urban)
Frequency
annual
Original unit
Index, 1982–84 = 100
Normalised unit
Index, 1982–84 = 100
Currency
USD
Missing data
None.
Last checked
2025-12-31
Licensing
Public domain (US federal statistics)
Source
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

Pop Indices is editorial and educational. Historical returns are described, never projected, and nothing here is investment advice. Film titles, characters and dialogue are referenced for commentary and remain the property of their rights holders.

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