Stock futures are mixed and Treasury yields are higher overnight. Baseball was the first sport to apply mathematical thinking to gaining an edge on the field. But now that every team knows how to do more with less by playing “Moneyball,” the richest clubs are back to buying wins through plain old money. Major League Baseball payrolls surged by a fifth this year to $5.8 billion. No U.S. league has such a big gap between top and bottom spenders. Standings at the All-Star break show it isn’t working so well says Jack Ablin, founding partner at family office Cresset. That has lessons for investing.

Consider the American League, where Ablin calculates that each additional dollar spent by teams got them fewer wins. Taken to its logical conclusion, a team that spent nothing on its players would, in theory, have had a slightly winning record. The deep-pocketed New York Yankees are an outlier with their good results, but even they trail the stingy Tampa Bay Rays.