While the rhetoric has died down since the signing of the new collective bargaining agreement in 2003, it’s still fairly common to hear people complaining about payroll disparities in baseball and the plight of small market teams who supposedly enter each season with no shot at winning the World Series, or even at posting a winning record.

Looking over this year’s field of playoff qualifiers, it’s not hard to have a bit of sympathy for teams with empty wallets (or at least for their fans). Of the four American League playoff teams, three – the Yankees, Red Sox, and Angels – rank among the top four in the majors in total payroll, and exactly one playoff team ranks among the lower half of the 30 MLB clubs in player salaries. That team, the San Diego Padres, comes in 16th.

Looked at another way, things still don’t look good for fans of small-market teams. Judging by television market-size rankings (a much more accurate gauge than raw population size of the financial strength a team draws from) all but two playoff teams hail from markets that rank among the 11 largest in the country. Of the two exceptions, one, St. Louis (no. 21) has a famously loyal fan-base that reaches through Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois, giving the team much greater resources than its market size might suggest – and in fact the Redbirds rank sixth in baseball in payroll. The other is San Diego, the 26th-largest market in the country. So judging by these two measures, the Padres are the only truly small-market team in the playoffs.

Is this evidence that the deck is stacked against poor teams in small cities? Not exactly. Looking at the total picture, actually, the opposite seems to be true. Baseball’s increased revenue sharing and the decline in salaries for top free agents seem to have had the effect of making it easier for all sorts of teams to succeed – something to keep in mind when the owners start agitating for curbs on payroll next summer when the new CBA is hammered out.

Making the playoffs is only one way to measure success, after all.

Oakland, which is in practice (if not in theory) a small market, stayed in contention until the final week of the season.

Minnesota didn’t make a fourth straight trip to the playoffs and finished with a disappointing 83-79 record, but will probably begin next season as the favorites in the AL Central. The Twins failed not because of a lack of money, but because some young hitters counted on to help carry their offense were injured and/or ineffective.

Cleveland, with the fifth-lowest payroll in the game, was a lucky bounce or two away from beating out the White Sox or Red Sox for a playoff berth, and was arguably the best team in the league, even if it did choke away a chance at the championship over the last week of the season.

Florida, like Cleveland a low-payroll team in a mid-sized market, had a good season and has won two World Series championships in 13 years of existence.

Milwaukee, which plays in the smallest media market of any major league team and had the fourth-lowest payroll in the game this year, finished 81-81 and looks ready to make a serious run at the wild card if not the NL Central next season.

These aren’t outliers. Among the top 10 teams in payroll, the five who didn’t make the playoffs included the Phillies, a very good team that stayed in the race all the way to the end; the Mets, a decent team in transition from a veteran club to a younger one; and the Mariners, Cubs, and Giants, all of them very bad teams this year with dim immediate futures. These days, money helps a team win, as it always has. But the big spending Cardinals have more in common with the relatively broke Twins than they do with the Mariners. The successful teams right now are all run intelligently; what money does is help a team do well consistently. If a team is run badly, like the Cubs, it will never reach the summit of baseball, no matter how much it spends.

In all, this is an exciting time to be a fan. There are good-to-excellent teams in all six of the country’s biggest media markets (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and the Bay Area), which is a very good thing for baseball. There are also teams like the Padres, Brewers, Twins, Indians, and Marlins in smaller markets that are doing well now and can be expected to do even better as soon as next year. As they show, there’s nothing systemic keeping down the game’s basket cases (Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay, and Kansas City), and nothing at all wrong with those teams that can’t be fixed by good fiscal management and investment in scouting, signing, developing, and retaining quality ballplayers. The next time you hear someone grousing about how poor teams can’t compete, give him the raspberry.

tmarchman@nysun.com