Payrolls and Baseball Success

There's been a lot of buzz about the teams in this year's World Series because each has a relatively small payroll.  Given the recent success of other low payroll teams, it's interesting to consider how strongly correlated payroll size and team success are. To get a quick sense, I took the Pearson r number for 2010 total team payroll and 2010 total regular season wins.  In the case of payroll and wins, the number was a relatively small .35.  Compare that to a value of .66 when one considers total wins and average age, or .38 when one correlates total wins with the age of the oldest player on the team. In other words, someone using only the age of the oldest player on the team to predict success in 2010 would have been more successful than someone who used payroll size.   (Data sources: payroll: http://baseball.about.com/od/newsrumors/a/2010baseballteampayrolls.htm, age data: http://espn.go.com/mlb/stats/rosters/_/sort/null/order/false, win totals: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/standings/?tcid=mm_mlb_standings)

ETA:  Data and calculations link