Talk:List of highest-paid Major League Baseball players

Data after 1985
Data after 1985 is verified through research by Doug Pappas, chairman of SABR's Business of Baseball Committee.


 * Mind you, Pappas only gives amounts for each individual year. The lifetime totals were added up by me and my calculator. Kingturtle 00:09, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Any need to mention if retired (some are, aome aren't) --Rj 00:29, Apr 10, 2004 (UTC)


 * I had mentioned which players were retired so readers could see who would be making more money this year, and who wouldn't be. Kingturtle 00:52, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)

would be interesting to show highest paid indexed to inflation--Confuzion 08:49, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
 * If you want to do the math, be our guest :) Kingturtle 05:08, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * Wow, I just totaled the salaries of the highest 100 MLB players and got $1.175 billion per year. According to the World Bank, that total is higher than the GDP of 28 countries.  Synesthetic 11:06, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Regarding Alex Rodriguez, surely if he gets paid $275 million over a 10 year contract, then his annual salary is $27.5 million and not $33 million? Feudonym (talk) 06:58, 18 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Joe Mauer does not belong on the chart listing the top-twenty five highest paid players. First of all, it's based on 2009 salaries (as the header obviously points out), and Mauer's contract extension is for the 2011 - 2018 seasons.  He'll still make only $12.5 million for this upcoming (2010) season based on his current contract that was to expire at the end of the 2010 season. SpaceJunkie (talk) 03:35, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Annual salaries by year
The following chart reveals the evolution of the highest paid player in Major League Baseball. A player's yearly salary is considered to be for the maximum value of the contract divided by the term of the contract in years.

YEAR   SALARY/YR  PLAYER             TEAM/ORGANIZATION 1927     $70,000  Babe Ruth          New York Yankees 1930     $80,000  Babe Ruth          New York Yankees 1949    $100,000  Ted Williams       Boston Red Sox 1966    $130,000  Willie Mays        San Francisco Giants 1972    $200,000  Hank Aaron         Atlanta Braves 1975    $740,000  Catfish Hunter     New York Yankees

Major League Baseball's reserve clause was struck down in 1976, beginning an era of free agency and thus market-value player contracts

1979  $1,000,000  Nolan Ryan         Houston Astros 1981  $2,000,000  Dave Winfield      New York Yankees 1985  $2,130,300  Mike Schmidt       Philadelphia Phillies 1986  $2,800,000  George Foster      New York Mets 1990  $3,000,000  Rickey Henderson   Oakland Athletics 1991  $4,700,000  José Canseco       Oakland Athletics 1992  $5,800,000  Bobby Bonilla      New York Mets 1993  $5,975,000* Ryne Sandberg      Chicago Cubs 1995  $9,237,500  Cecil Fielder      Detroit Tigers 1997 $10,000,000  Albert Belle       Chicago White Sox 1998 $14,936,667  Gary Sheffield     Florida Marlins 2000 $15,714,286  Kevin Brown        Los Angeles Dodgers 2001 $22,000,000  Alex Rodriguez     Texas Rangers 2005 $26,000,000  Alex Rodriguez     New York Yankees 2009 $33,000,000  Alex Rodriguez     New York Yankees

* Ryne Sandberg's 1993 contract was originally for $7,100,000 per year, but he retired before the contract expired and forfeited the back-loaded end of the contract.

Note for future
Another possible link for 11 average salary data. 1 Staxringold talkcontribs 15:07, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Another useful table/link for future editors. 2 Staxringold talkcontribs 15:16, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Proposed removal of redundant publisher information
A number of citations in this article unnecessarily include the publisher for periodicals and websites that have their own Wikipedia article. This information has no value to anyone wanting to check or track down references. For example, publisher=Washington Post Company for references to The Washington Post, or publisher=MLB Advanced Media for references to MLB.com, only make the article longer - significantly longer when repeated many times - without adding anything useful. Therefore I plan to upgrade the article's citations to remove all such redundant publisher info, bringing them into line with the recommended use of the cite template (see Template:Citation). I'll also remove redundant 'location' parameters (e.g. work=New York Times|location=New York), as suggested by the template's usage guidelines. Please raise any questions here or on my talk page. Colonies Chris (talk) 15:15, 26 November 2012 (UTC)