The History of Baseball Salaries: From Babe Ruth to Nine-Figure Contracts

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 9 min read

How baseball pay grew from Babe Ruth's era to nine-figure deals, with average, median and top salaries from 1985 to 2016 computed from the historical record and honest cautions about what contract headlines hide.

In 1985 the average salary in the historical record's salary table was $476,299. By 2016, the last year the table covers, it was $4,396,410, more than nine times as much. The highest-paid player in 1985, Mike Schmidt, earned $2,130,300; the highest-paid in 2016, Clayton Kershaw, earned $33,000,000. The median player, the one in the exact middle of the list, went from $400,000 to $1,500,000, a far smaller rise, and that gap between average and median is the single most important thing to know about baseball pay.

Salaries in baseball did not rise on a smooth curve. They moved in steps, and each step lines up with a change in the rules of the labor market: the end of the reserve clause as it had been, the arrival of free agency, a stretch of owner collusion in the 1980s, strikes and lockouts, and the long run of new collective bargaining agreements that followed. The money is the visible result of a power struggle that was fought mostly in arbitration rooms and bargaining sessions.

This article uses the historical salary table for the years it covers and explains what it can and cannot tell you. For the larger contracts of the last decade, where no free public table exists, it describes them with caution and tells you where to check for current figures.

What the historical salary table is, and is not

The historical record includes a table of salaries by player, club and year from 1985 to 2016. It lists each player's recorded salary for the season. It is not a complete account of compensation: it does not break out signing bonuses, deferred money or incentives, it does not show the average annual value of a multi-year contract, and it says nothing about minor league pay. Its coverage also varies from year to year: it lists 550 players for 1985, 867 for 1990 and 853 for 2016, which means a change in an average can reflect a change in which players are included as much as a change in pay.

That caveat matters most for the median. The average and the median in the table below were calculated for this article from the rows the database lists, and they describe the players recorded in the table, not every person who ever wore a major league uniform in that year. They are good for showing the direction and the scale of change. They are not an official payroll statistic.

For salaries before 1985 and after 2016, no equivalent open table exists, so the history is told with documented events and a few well-known figures, not with a series.

Before the table: Ruth, the reserve clause and the first agreements

For most of the first century of professional baseball, players had little bargaining power. The reserve clause bound a player to his club from year to year, so a player who wanted to leave could not simply sign elsewhere. The clause is the subject of its own article, the reserve clause and how it ended, which covers Curt Flood's lawsuit and the arbitration decision in the Messersmith and McNally cases.

Stars could still be paid well. Babe Ruth's salary of $80,000 in 1930 and 1931 is among the best-known numbers in the sport's history. As the story is told, he was reminded that this was more than the President earned and answered that he had had a better year than the President had. It is a good story and a widely repeated one, though the exact wording varies from telling to telling, and the useful part is the scale: an $80,000 salary in 1930 was an enormous sum, and it made Ruth an exception, not a model. Most of his contemporaries earned a small fraction of that.

The change began in the 1960s, when the players' union hired Marvin Miller and the clubs began to bargain with it. The first collective agreement came in 1968. The reserve system fell in practical terms after the December 1975 arbitration ruling in the Messersmith and McNally grievances, and free agency, in a negotiated form, arrived with the 1976 agreement. The full sequence is in the history of baseball collective bargaining and in how free agency works and where it came from.

Salaries by year, 1985 to 2016

Here is the average, the median and the highest-paid player for selected years, computed from the historical salary table.

Read the table in three passes. The first is the average, which rises almost without interruption. The second is the top salary, which rises faster than the average. The third is the median, which is volatile and sometimes falls, because it depends heavily on how many low-paid players are on the list in a given year. The median drop from 1985 to 1990 and again in 1995 is mostly about who is in the sample, since the 1985 table lists 550 players and the 1995 table lists 986.

The 1980s: a plateau built by collusion

The average in 1985 was $476,299, and in 1990 it was $511,974, a rise of less than 8 percent in five years. In the same period the top salary climbed from $2,130,300 to $3,200,000, with Robin Yount as the highest-paid player in 1990.

That flat stretch is not an accident. In the mid-1980s the owners were found by arbitrators to have acted together to avoid signing free agents, which became known as collusion. The affected free agents were paid less than they would have been in a competitive market. The arbitrators ruled against the owners in three separate cases, and a settlement of $280 million in 1990 compensated players. The full account, including what the owners did and what the arbitrators ruled, is in the collusion years of the 1980s.

The 1991 row of the table shows what happened when the market opened up. The average salary jumped from $511,974 to $894,961 in one year, a rise of about 75 percent, and the top salary rose to $3,800,000. Some of the change reflects a different sample of players, as 1991 lists 685 players and 1990 lists 867. Even so, it is the largest one-year step in the table.

The 1990s: from $6 million to $15 million

Look at the highest-paid player year by year. Bobby Bonilla of the New York Mets is the top salary in 1992, 1993 and 1994, at $6,100,000, $6,200,000 and $6,300,000. The Mets' own story, including the period of those contracts, is told in the franchise history. In 1995 and 1996 the top figure was $9,237,500, paid to Cecil Fielder of the Tigers. In 1997 Albert Belle of the White Sox reached $10,000,000, the first time the top figure hit eight digits.

In 1998 Gary Sheffield of the Florida Marlins topped the list at $14,936,667, and in 1999 Belle, now with Baltimore, led at $11,949,794. By 2000 Kevin Brown of the Dodgers was at $15,714,286. The top of the table moves in lumps, because one new contract at the very top resets the figure. The 1994 strike, which wiped out the end of that season and the postseason, did not stop the climb.

The average rose from $1,049,589 in 1994 to $1,485,536 in 1999 and then to $1,992,985 in 2000. The 2000 figure comes from a smaller list than the 1999 one, 836 players against 1,006, so the size of the jump is exaggerated by the sample. The direction is real.

The 2000s: the first twenty-million-dollar player

The top salary crossed $20 million in 2001, when Alex Rodriguez was listed at $22,000,000 for the Texas Rangers. That season was the first of the 10-year, $252 million contract he signed before the 2001 season, which was the largest in the sport's history at the time. Rodriguez led the table again in 2002 and 2003 at the same figure.

He led more often than anyone. With the Yankees he is listed at $26,000,000 in 2005, $28,000,000 in 2008 and $33,000,000 in both 2009 and 2010, and then at $32,000,000 in 2011, $30,000,000 in 2012 and $29,000,000 in 2013. Across the table he appears as the top-paid player in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013, which is 11 of the 32 years. Manny Ramirez led in 2004 at $22,500,000 and Jason Giambi in 2007 at $23,428,571. Zack Greinke led in 2014 at $26,000,000, and Clayton Kershaw in 2015 and 2016 at $32,571,000 and $33,000,000.

The 2016 top salary of $33,000,000 is equal to Rodriguez's 2009 and 2010 salary. In other words, the ceiling of the pay scale in 2016 was no higher than it had been seven seasons earlier, while the average kept rising. The very top is set by a few contracts and can hold or even dip for years, while the average climbs from the middle of the market.

Why the average misleads and the median helps

In 2016 the average salary was $4,396,410, but the median was only $1,500,000. That means half of the listed players earned less than a million and a half dollars, even though the average was almost three times as high. A relatively small number of stars with the largest salaries pull the average up, the way one tall building pulls up the average height of a block.

The gap points to the structure of the pay scale. A young player's salary in his first three years is set largely by the minimum and what the club chooses to offer above it, so most players earn close to the minimum before they qualify for arbitration. The historical table shows the minimum listed salary at $60,000 in 1985 and $507,500 in 2016. After roughly three years of service, a player becomes eligible for salary arbitration, and after six years he can become a free agent. The big paydays go to players in that final group.

The result is a market with a steep top and a broad base, which is one reason the sport's labor disputes have often been about how the middle is treated. The history is in the collective bargaining article, and the role of the commissioner's office in those fights is in the commissioners of baseball.

Putting the dollars in proportion

The average rose about 9.2 times between 1985 and 2016, and the top salary about 15.5 times. Consumer prices in the United States rose by a little more than a factor of two over the same period, so after adjusting for inflation, the average player's pay roughly quadrupled and the top player's rose about seven-fold. These are rough conversions and the point is the order of magnitude: the growth is real, and it is not an inflation illusion.

Revenue grew too. Television contracts, ballpark revenue and, more recently, streaming and local media deals fed the growth. The article on how baseball teams make money is a better guide to those flows than a salary table can be.

A second lens is the share of revenue going to players, which is hard to measure from public data and which the two sides have argued about for decades. The historical table has nothing to say about it, and no table that omits club revenue can.

Nine-figure contracts, with caution

After 2016, the historical salary table stops, and the most visible stories are contract totals. The $252 million deal Rodriguez signed in 2000 was the first to reach that scale. Giancarlo Stanton's 13-year, $325 million deal in 2014 and Mike Trout's 12-year, $426.5 million deal in 2019 were later landmarks. Shohei Ohtani's 10-year, $700 million contract in 2023 was larger still, but most of its value is deferred to later years, which makes the headline number a poor guide to what he is paid each season.

That example is a good reason to treat contract totals carefully. A headline figure usually combines years, signing bonuses and deferred payments into a single sum. A contract that pays $700 million on paper but defers most of it has a much lower present value, because money paid years from now is worth less than money paid today. The competitive balance tax, which charges clubs that exceed a payroll threshold, counts a contract by its average annual value, not by what is paid in a given year.

A famous case of deferral is Bobby Bonilla, who is the top-paid player in the 1992 to 1994 rows of the table. His deal with the Mets was restructured so that, starting in 2011, the club pays him about $1.19 million a year through 2035. That is a documented arrangement, and it is one reason July 1 became a running joke among fans.

As of the 2025 season, contract sizes keep changing, and any figure in an article is out of date quickly. For current numbers, rely on the clubs, the players' union and the league's own reports.

Common questions

What was the average salary in baseball in 1985? The historical salary table gives $476,299 across the 550 players it lists, with a median of $400,000.

Who was the highest-paid player in the table's last year? Clayton Kershaw, at $33,000,000 in 2016.

Who led the most often? Alex Rodriguez led the table in 11 of its 32 years.

Why did salaries jump around 1991? The table's average rose about 75 percent from 1990 to 1991, following the collusion years, though the list of players changed too.

Is there a salary table after 2016? Not in the historical record. For recent contracts, check the clubs and the players' union.

Where to go next

If this article raised questions about how players get paid, start with how free agency works, then read the collusion years of the 1980s and the reserve clause and how it ended. The site's leaders pages and the business and labor topic page collect more on the economics of the sport.