THE tragedy that engulfed the New York Yankees when Cory Lidle, their pitcher, flew a light aircraft into a condominium in Manhattan this week eclipsed the misery that fans of the Bronx Bombers felt when their team were eliminated last weekend from contention for this year’s World Series.

The accident temporarily silenced the anger that had been building after another season of expensive failure. But it is a fair bet that, New York being New York, the pause will be only temporary.

Very quickly, New Yorkers will get back to pondering and seething over one of the most vexing puzzles of modern sport: How can a team who, like Chelsea in the Barclays Premiership, have spent so much on the best talent in the world, but, unlike Chelsea, have failed to translate that investment into success on the field?

The Yankees were knocked out of the Major League Baseball play-offs in a humiliating defeat by the Detroit Tigers, a team with a payroll less than half that of the Yankees’ $200 million (about £108 million). A sixth straight year without winning the World Series had, before the Lidle tragedy, consumed Yankees fans and much of their anger had been directed at George Steinbrenner, the owner.

The Yankees’ failure has come even as Steinbrenner has poured more and more money into the franchise, drawing baseball aficionados to complain that, like Roman Abramovich’s plutocrats, the Yankees are destroying the idea of balanced competition in the sport.

The franchise won 26 World Series titles between 1923 and 2000. Since then, they have drawn a blank, even though every ensuing off-season has seen the Yankees scanning the horizon for the best available players and then signing them. This year, it was Johnny Damon, acquired from the Boston Red Sox, their fierce rivals, on a $13 million annual salary. In

2004, it was Alex Rodríguez, traded from the Texas Rangers along with his record-breaking $22 million yearly wage.

The Yankees’ total payroll in 2006 was $80 million more than the next team, the Red Sox — who also flopped this season after a solid start — and at least double all the other 28 teams in the major leagues.

But the Yankees’ now-ritual October collapse is only one aspect of a striking and unexpected new equality in baseball. In the five seasons up to and including 2000, New York won the World Series four times. There have been five different winners since and this year will provide a sixth.

The teams who remain in contention again underline how baseball seems to have become so open and immune to financial domination. In the American League Championship Series, the Tigers are facing the Oakland Athletics, who have been a symbol for relative poverty.

They and their legendary general manager, Billy Beane, were the subject of the bestselling book Moneyball by Michael Lewis, which documented in 2003 how the team scoured the market for undervalued players and then got the best out of them to compete favourably against teams, such as the Yankees, who had four times their payroll — the US equivalent of Bolton Wanderers.

The National League Championship Series is between the New York Mets, who have not won a World Series since 1986 and the St Louis Cardinals, last winners in 1982. Oakland’s success leads to a question: Is there some kind of Moneyball-type reason that would explain the Yankees’ failures? Might there be — in other sports, too, such as football — a magic formula that will enable relatively poor teams to take on and beat the wealthy?

Raymond Sauer, professor of economics at Clemson University in South Carolina and author of the popular Sports Economist weblog, has examined the relationship between financial muscle and success on the field and thinks that the Yankees have simply succumbed to the increased element of chance involved in a knockout contest. The baseball year consists of a regular season of 162 games. From each of the American and National leagues , the three division winners and a fourth team with the next best record then go into a knockout tournament.