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The Phillies suck. They’re the worst team in baseball with 22 wins. They’ve lost six in a row, nine of their last 10, and 16 of their last 19. They’re on pace to lose 106 games. They just added Domonic Brown, who’s mostly sucked in AAA for Lehigh Valley this year, to an outfield that is shaping up to be the worst ever, which includes Ben Revere, who sucks.

Here’s another way to express just how badly the Phillies suck.

This weekend, Forbes released their list of the top 100 highest-paid athletes in the world. There were only three local players– all Phillies. They came in at 40th (Ryan Howard, $25 million in salary, $600k in endorsements), 42nd (Cliff Lee, $25 million in salary, $200k in endorsements), and 61st (Cole Hamels, $22.5 million in salary, $200k in endorsements). It’s a reminder of just how much the Phillies are overpaying to put this slop on the field. Their 2015 payroll, as of Opening Day, (their lowest since 2010), is $146,889,667. Their cost per win is, expectedly, among the highest in baseball [UPDATE: it should be noted that the cost per win will come down over the course of the season– the metric is used here just to gauge payroll vs. wins]:

cpw

But this doesn’t tell the whole story of how hilariously inefficient the Phillies are. Take the Dodgers, for example. Their cost per win is astronomical, but they actually… win. In a perfect world, winning would be commensurate with what you spend. So paying a lot per win but winning a lot is forgivable. You gotta spend money to make money win games. With that in mind, we figured out a team’s “payroll efficiency”– if you spend the most money, you reasonably expect to be the best team, and if you spend the 10th most, you expect to be 10th best, etc. The difference in a team’s win and payroll ranking determines their payroll efficiency. Spending money to win is good, winning while spending very little is better. What the Phillies are doing is just the complete opposite:

payroll efficiency

The Dodgers, at -1, are just about breaking even with their spend-win relationship. The Astros are putting up a phenomenal win total given how much they’re spending. And then there’s the Phillies… who, of course, are dead last, tied with the Red Sox (who get a pass because they’ve won three World Series in the last 11 years). Not only is their cost per win among the highest in baseball, but the problem is compounded by the fact that THEY DON’T WIN. It’s seriously almost difficult to be this pathetic.

[All payroll numbers from Baseball Prospectus]