Payroll = Wins
............
The above is from Tom Tango's fine site. Before proceeding further ... amigos might want to take a look at this chart and this chart.
Look at how MANY of those teams are right on the correlation line. The Yankees (far right) are almost purely a function of salaries paid. They have done slightly worse than they should have, for the dollars.
People want to look at the Twins and say, "money's not such a big deal." You might as well look at the A's and say, "offense isn't such a big deal. They do okay with better-than-average pitching." That shouldn't distract us from the fact that as a team scores more runs, it wins more games.