In 2002, general manager Billy Beane constructed a contentious Oakland Athletics team on a shoestring budget. That season, the A’s and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays had the two lowest payrolls in all of baseball. Nearly two decades later, the two clubs are facing off in the 2019 American League Wild Card Game, while still maintaining two of the lowest budgets in the league. In 2019, Oakland’s total salary of $92,894,531 stood at 6th lowest out of 30 teams. The Tampa Bay Rays boasted an even lower payroll at $64,178,722, good enough for lowest in the entire league. To put those numbers in perspective, 11 teams had a larger budget than the A’s and Rays’ combined. Of those 11 teams, 6 missed the playoffs, including the clubs with the two highest payrolls in the Red Sox and Cubs. In fact, the Red Sox’s league-high salary was more than double of Oakland’s and more than triple of Tampa’s. Below, you can take a look at how the A’s (green) and Rays (blue) outperformed other teams with low salaries as well as how their payrolls compared to those of other playoff clubs.

So how did these two teams both find their way into October baseball? It started with free agency, or rather, a lack thereof. Baseball free agents are notoriously among the most handsomely paid athletes in the world. Take a look at Manny Machado and Bryce Harper, two free agents who both penned contracts that would earn them around $30 million a year prior to the 2019 season. Neither player would wind up taking their team to the playoffs, and Machado posted a career low 3.1 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) for seasons where he played more than a hundred games. Essentially, although big free agent signings can contribute to any team, they come at a significant cost and an even more significant risk. One could argue that the biggest reason the AL Wild Card teams were able to maintain such small salaries was due to the relatively low number of free agents on their rosters. Oakland carried just four free agents on their Wild Card team, while Tampa Bay had two. In comparison, other playoff teams like the Washington Nationals and the Atlanta Braves each had 9 free agents on their rosters, while the Milwaukee Brewers had 8. Rather than making big splashes on the Hot Stove, the A’s and Rays were more conservative with their signings, instead choosing to spend their money on key players with high upside, such as the Rays’ Wild Card Game starter Charlie Morton, whose $15 million salary comprised 23.37% of the team’s entire payroll. Morton would finish the 2019 regular season with a 5.0 WAR in addition to a team-leading 15 wins en route to winning the Rays’ 2019 MVP award.

A low number of free agents means that the AL Wild Card teams built their rosters through other means. In both cases, a large portion of the teams were acquired via trade, with 16 and 17 players coming this way to the A’s and Rays, respectively. This is the most out of all the other playoff teams, with the remaining clubs having an average of 9.38 players via trade. Players acquired from trades were a huge part of both teams’ playoff runs, providing 24.9 out of 50.2 (49.6%) of Oakland’s total team WAR and 31.1 out of 50.7 (61.3%) for Tampa Bay. Take a look at how each roster is broken down in terms of WAR.

Now examine other teams with different roster compositions split their team WAR.

Now, let’s take a look at some notable players on each team that came through trades. In December 2014, the A’s shipped Jeff Samardzjia to the Chicago White Sox in exchange for a benched infielder in Marcus Semien, a rarely-used reliever in Chris Bassitt, and a backup catcher in Josh Phegley. Fast forward to 2019, and Semien is Oakland’s MVP while leading the team with an 8.1 WAR, Bassitt has become a solid starter with 10 wins and an above average 3.81 Earned Run Average (ERA), and Phegley leads the American League in runners caught stealing as a catcher. Meanwhile, other key pieces, such as closer Liam Hendricks (3.5 WAR, 1.80 ERA), were acquired as minor league prospects in trades. As for Tampa Bay, the Chris Archer deal with the Pittsburgh Pirates during the 2018 season yielded two players in Austin Meadows (3.8 WAR) and Tyler Glasnow (2.6 WAR, 1.76 ERA) who broke out with their first All-Star seasons. Meadows was even named the Rays’ co-MVP alongside Charlie Morton. Key pieces such as Tommy Pham (3.7 WAR) and Willy Adames (4.2) also arrived via the trade block. As one continues looking at the other moves that helped yield key players for these teams, a common trend seems to appear: the A’s and Rays take chances on those that other teams have lost faith in.

Of course, no contender can maintain a low salary without drafting young talent. Hitting on a draft prospect in baseball is incredibly difficult. From 1981 to 2010, only 17.6% of all draftees ended up making a big league roster. Only 9.8% of all prospects that are drafted end up posting at least a measly 0.1 career WAR, a task that was accomplished by relative no-name players such as Gabriel Ynoa (1-10 Win-Loss Record) and Ty France (.234 Batting Average). Despite the odds, the A’s managed to successfully find franchise cornerstones in Matt Chapman (6.7 WAR) and Matt Olson (5.1) in the draft, while the Rays found key, contributing pieces in Brandon Lowe (2.9) and Kevin Kiermaier (2.3). These mismash teams of scrappy, forgotten athletes and young, unproven talent, all desperate to make a name for themselves, is what propels the ultimate underdog story that lies within the AL Wild Card Game.

In his bestseller novel, Moneyball, Michael Lewis wrote that baseball “was ceasing to be an athletic competition and becoming a financial one.” As big-market teams with seemingly endless budgets throw money at stars and try to buy their way to a ring, it becomes increasingly difficult for small, homegrown clubs like the Athletics and Rays to emerge into the spotlight. Billy Beane’s 2002 A’s managed to compile a group of overlooked, undervalued, and unappreciated players. Almost twenty years later, the A’s and Rays have continued to use this formula to find success. To put in perspective how hard it is to win with a low payroll, of the 80 teams that have made the playoffs since MLB implemented the Wild Card Game in 2012, only 14 of those teams (17.5%) had one of the ten lowest budgets in the league. And as a final testament to how impressively the A’s and Rays have performed over the past decade, half of those 14 clubs have brought October baseball to Oakland and Tampa Bay.