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When he worked for the Major League Baseball Players Association under Miller, Dick Moss feared the changing perception of the athlete, and he was right: as the money grew, so too did the resentment.
Highest paid baseball player professional#
It was the kind of capitalism by which Americans always said they swore, and they did swear by it – until they saw just what these suits were willing to pay professional athletes ( to play a kid’s game!).
Highest paid baseball player free#
It was the real money of a free market – the self-made, you’re-worth-whatever-someone’s-willing-to-pay-you kind of market that was now theirs. The players had fought and won their freedom from the reserve clause that had bound them to one team for life, and with free agency – the dreaded free agency that even the players were brainwashed into believing would kill the game if realized – came the real money. It would enrage Marvin Miller, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, every time this position was reinforced when the multimillion-dollar business of baseball was referred to as a kid’s game, and worse, every time the players themselves sank into that sugary, love-of-the-game bullcrap and told the world they loved baseball so much they would have played for free.īy opening day 1984, Rickey was 25 and the average American household income had increased two and a half times, to $26,430 … but the average big league salary? It was now 12 times higher, at $329,000. To the public, no matter what the salary, the players were always the lucky ones. To the average Joe, the anonymous cog working in his miserable cubicle every day who literally had to beg just to get a lousy 25-buck-a-week raise, adulation was compensation enough. The players got the fame, the girls, the cheers, and the whole world chanted their names. The public was rarely sympathetic, however, because most fans would kill to be able to just once – just once! – hit a ball the way Reggie did at Tiger Stadium when he took Dock Ellis off the transformer at the 1971 All-Star Game, or to hear the crowd gasp for them the way it did for Rickey when his fingers waggled, his legs gave that predator’s twitch … and … bam! – he was gone. The outliers were the Mount Olympus guys, however, guys like Aaron and Mays, DiMaggio and Williams, who were the best to ever play baseball – and who made their biggest money near or at the very end of their career.Įven though the players were the game, they didn’t share in the profits.
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There were always the outliers – a few players who dwarfed what the average American worker brought home, like Babe Ruth, who earned $80,000 a year during the Great Depression years of 19. Mays ended his spectacular 22-year career never making more than $180,000 a year.
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Hank Aaron was in the final year of a three-year, $600,000 contract that at signing had made him the highest-paid player in the history of the game at $200,000 per season. The average major league salary was $35,000. That year, the same year Rickey Henderson turned 16, the median household income in the United States was $11,000. He’s due another $30 million in 2021.B aseball players weren’t regular guys, but in 1974 they earned only slightly more than three times what the average American family paying to watch them play brought home. Like Cabrera, Pujols is still going strong in the league. 2 with $298.5 million in career earnings.
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Cabrera is still due over $100 million over the next five years.Īlbert Pujols comes in at No. He’s earned $279.9 million in the MLB, and he’s not done yet. Miguel Cabrera is the first non-Yankee to appear in the top-five. He spent his entire career in New York, but he never earned more than $27 million in a single year. Sabathia’s longtime teammate, Derek Jeter, slots in at No. After spending the first eight years of his career with the Cleveland Indians and Milwaukee Brewers, Sabathia signed with the Yankees and went on to make $221 million in New York. 5 with $264.8 million in career earnings. To no one’s surprise, three of them were long-time New York Yankees.ĬC Sabathia checks in at No. RELATED: John Wall Is the Fourth-Highest Paid NBA Player This Year and Hasn’t Played Since 2018ĭespite today’s $300-million contracts being thrown out like coupons, only five players in MLB history have totaled more than $250 million in earnings so far.