Posted by dahsdebater on 11/6/2015 8:36:00 PM (view original):
Not necessarily.
I'd wager that amongst players with similar oWAR numbers, there is at least a slight trend towards guys with higher Ks having higher salaries. So you could get the same offensive production from two teams, but you might expect that more often than not, the team with more Ks cost more. That leaves fewer resources for defense and pitching. Before free agency, your statement is inherently true. During the era of free agency, when only 1 or 2 teams can actually afford to buy the best talent that wants to play for them at every position, there are economic tradeoffs.
I took a look at 2015 salaries, K rates, and wRC+.
I broke wRC+ down into three sections, >150, 130-139, and 110-129.
It doesn't look like players with a higher K rate cost more relative to players with a lower K rate and similar offensive production.
Disclaimer, the sample is relatively small (58 in the largest group), and only looks at 2015 production vs 2015 salary. Most of the long term deals were signed at least a couple years before, so the salary is likely based on past production.
Still, there isn't a publicly accessible salary & stats database that I could find, so I had to piece a couple together.
Here is the 110-129 plot, $5,000 = $5 million: