Baseball Payrolls Get New York Times Infographic Treatment

The New York Times is back with another smart, tasteful, and helpful graphic.

On the heels of its stunning women’s tennis video comes “Putting a Price Tag on Winning,” a snapshot plotting the payroll of baseball teams against their expected and real success. It’s a cool way to think about baseball teams, especially in light of Deadspin’s MLB Confidential investigation of teams’ finances.

Unlike the women’s tennis video, however, the price tag graphic ran in Sunday’s sports section as a half-page graphic. As a result, the Internet version lacks the dynamic functionality of a true NYTimes.com feature. They could have done a lot more with the graphic if it were a web-only. The graphic as it stands isn’t bad; it just feels incomplete, a throwback to the days when newspapers simply put their print content online.

Your winners: The Florida Marlins, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the NYT.com tech team, which didn’t have to do much in order to get this thing online.

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