How Hall of Famers rank for salary in 2012 dollars

When Babe Ruth signed for $80,000 prior to the 1930 baseball season, as the apocryphal story goes, someone admonished him that he was making more than President Herbert Hoover. “I know,” the Bambino is said to have replied, “But I had a better year than Hoover.”

What’s shocking now, more than 80 years on, is not what Ruth may have said—granted, it was a valid assertion in those early days of the Great Depression—or how much the Colossus of Clout commanded. It’s that Ruth’s $80,000 1930 salary adjusts with inflation to $1,086,882 in 2012 dollars. That’s about a third of the current average major league baseball salary, which rose to a record of $3.2 million last year.

This isn’t to say the Sultan of Swat was underpaid historically. In fact, before the advent of free agency in the mid-1970s, no player ever received a higher salary in 2012 dollars than what Ruth got in 1933: $1,436,298. Willie Mays came close in 1959, his $160,000 salary that season good for $1,275,616 in 2012 dollars. The $80,000 that Ruth received in 1933, when the average laborer earned $20 a week and 24.9 percent of Americans were unemployed, simply had more purchasing power.

This is just one thing I learned through a recent long evening on Baseball-Reference.com. The website added salary information as well as a drop down inflation calculator to player pages not long ago. Culled largely from research by University of Wisconsin professor Michael Haupert, the salary info is a work in progress, with some long-ago players having it for only one or two years. But it offers an interesting glimpse into baseball’s history.

Using the information, I ranked every Hall of Fame player for his top salary in 2012 dollars—not necessarily his top actual salary, just whatever adjusted highest with inflation. What I found confirmed how good ballplayers have it today. It also showed the degree to which nearly every other generation of players has been exploited by its clubs.

In the interest of readability, I’ll split the following list into three parts. We’ll start with the 39 Hall of Famers who have received at least $1 million in a season in 2012 dollars:

It’s a wonder the list above doesn’t have more names. I shouldn’t be surprised. The minimum MLB salary was $7,000 in 1966 when Marvin Miller became executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. The average American household income that year was $6,900. By and large, baseball’s top salaries rose at a rate slightly higher than inflation for decades. But it wasn’t until arbiter Peter Seitz abrogated the Reserve Clause in 1975 that players began regularly topping $1 million in today’s dollars. The rest is history.

The Atlantic suggested in April 2012 that ballplayers remain underpaid, given the slim percentage of MLB revenue they receive. Players still have it about as good as they’ve ever had it. (Most teams do, too. Forbes reported March 27 that MLB revenues are at record levels, with the most valuable franchise, the Yankees, worth $2.3 billion.)

Cooperstown is typically slow, by design, to reflect changes in baseball, with the names on the list above primarily the early beneficiaries of free agency. That said, I suspect within 15 or 20 years, there could be twice as many Hall of Famers who will have earned the equivalent of $1 million in a season. Inflation alone will push the historic salaries of some men already in the Hall above seven figures. And there’s a slew of millionaire players awaiting enshrinement.

Ballplayers finally have economic clout and precedent, after so many baseball generations where the opposite was true. As Jim Bouton wrote in a postscript to Ball Four, 10 years after its original publication:

The irony is that if the owners hadn’t abused the players so badly, we wouldn’t have gone out and hired Marvin Miller and the players wouldn’t be free agents today. If the owners had just doubled the minimum salary, say to $14,000, and given us some extra meal money, we would have been more content to let things ride. Most ballplayers had no idea what kind of money they could be making. I remember sitting in the Yankee clubhouse while the player representative asked each of us what we thought the minimum salary should be. This was when it was $7,000. The players were all saying numbers like $8,000, $9,000, or $10,000. When it came to me I said $25,000 and everybody just laughed.

In the years before Miller, Seitz and others revolutionized labor relations in baseball, few players were compensated anywhere close to Ruth and Mays. Even adjusting for inflation, over half the players enshrined in Cooperstown never earned the current major league minimum salary of $490,000. Also telling to me is the attitude of a baseball immortal like Hank Greenberg, publicly doubting in The Glory of Their Times that he really earned his $75,000 salary from 1947 on the field.

It makes me wonder how systematically teams pushed players to devalue their services so as to maximize profits. This isn’t unique to baseball, of course. It’s kind of a core tenet of capitalism.

Greenberg and 43 other Hall of Famers topped out, in 2012 dollars, between $500,000 and $1 million during their playing careers:

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Notice all the Yankee legends listed above: Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig, Phil Rizzuto, Yogi Berra. Contemporary fans may know the Bronx Bombers as the best team money can buy. It’s been this way since George Steinbrenner became the first owner to turn a baseball franchise around through free agency. Historically, the Yankees owe just as much if not more of their success to frugality, to shrewd negotiation tactics like leveraging the promise of frequent World Series bonuses. David Halberstam wrote in Summer of ’49 of Yankee right fielder Tommy Henrich telling Red Sox Hall of Famer Bobby Doerr at an old-timers game, “We needed the extra money from the World Series check. That was our extra salary.”

Granted, New York paid better than many franchises. The lower echelons of this list is a who’s who of Hall of Famers from the St. Louis Cardinals, Philadelphia Phillies and other small market clubs that could not or would not pay more. There was of course less money in baseball in the days before television contracts, revenue sharing and regular ticket sellouts. (The late Doug Pappas of SABR’s Business of Baseball Committee posted historic MLB financial data.)

Even the Yankees weren’t immune to harsh economic realities. In his club history, Pinstripe Empire, Marty Appel includes attendance figures for every year in team history. They peak around 1.3 million spectators during Ruth’s career, 2.3 million during DiMaggio’s and 1.7 million during Mantle’s. It’s a far cry from the 3,542,406 the Yankees drew in 2012.

Mostly, though, I suspect that teams threw scraps at players because they could. Players had pitifully low bargaining power in the years before free agency, the Reserve Clause making them the property of their clubs for perpetuity. Players were disposable commodities, with legendary pinch pennies like Branch Rickey telling Ralph Kiner upon trading him from the Pirates to the Cubs in 1953, “We finished last with you. We can finish last without you.”

There were generally no other competing professional circuits, since baseball has informally received an exemption from antitrust laws since 1922 and has always moved quickly to crush rival leagues. Players who did jump, such as Sal Maglie and Mickey Owen who went to the Mexican League in 1946, faced severe repercussions, even lifetime bans.

Players found different ways to make the best of their situations. Some successfully held out like Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, who negotiated together in 1966 for a combined $235,000, roughly $1.68 million in 2012 dollars. Ty Cobb ate for free at Joe DiMaggio’s family restaurant after instructing the Yankee Clipper early in his career on how to properly haggle with Ed Barrow for a higher salary. And Jim Brosnan wrote in The Long Season of teammate Stan Musial advising, “The first principle of contract negotiation is: don’t remind ’em of what you did in the past; tell them what you’re going to do for them in the future. They know what you’re selling; they’ve bought it before. Now promise greater things to come.”

For the most part, teams dictated contract terms, extending generosity as they saw fit. Some players like Hack Wilson in 1931 secured windfalls following big seasons. Others were rewarded for loyalty, Cobb, Honus Wagner and others receiving temporary raises while the rival Federal League operated from 1914-15. Beyond this, many of the players on this list got their best salaries at the ends of their careers. I take this to have been token gestures from clubs. It certainly did little to set these players up for retirement. It’s why when the original pension system was set up, it had to be amended for Hall of Famers like Carl Hubbell who initially weren’t covered.

Many baseball greats had to play in the minors for years after they left the majors. It’s unheard of today for Hall of Famers, but players did it regularly in the first half of the 20th century whether it was 42-year-old Nap Lajoie hitting .380 in the International League in 1917 or Iron Man Joe McGinnity (who earned his nickname working in a steel foundry) pitching in the bushes until age 54. Others like Chief Bender and Wagner needed coaching jobs in retirement to escape the realities of the Depression. Grover Cleveland Alexander died alone in a rented room in 1950. While surely his alcoholism impoverished and isolated him, his top salary of $236,860 in 2012 dollars couldn’t have helped matters much.

Adjusting for inflation, 118 Hall of Fame players never earned the current MLB minimum of $490,000 in a season. Due to technical space constraints, I’ll list some of them here and the remainder in the References section:

This isn’t to suggest the average baseball player was embittered or had good reason to be. A few years ago, I interviewed a man named Art Mahan who played first base on the 1940 Phillies. In Mahan’s only season in the majors, the Phillies went 50-103 and drew 207,177 fans, Mahan for his part posting one of the lowest adjusted offensive production rates for a first baseman in baseball history. Nearly 70 years later, I heard nothing but gratitude and wonder from Mahan. He spoke of meeting his wife in Philadelphia that year, saying he never would’ve met her otherwise. The $6,000 salary he received, the equivalent of $96,916 in 2012, was better than four times the average U.S. income that year of $1,368. Mahan earned enough, in fact, for a few of his brothers to make down payments on houses.

Don’t get me wrong. Since Lip Pike signed the first professional baseball contract in 1866, for $20 from Philadelphia, players have been lucky. To make any amount of money playing baseball, let alone a living wage is lucky. Making the Hall of Fame is luckier still. Every man on this list attained some degree of baseball immortality with his enshrinement. Most, if not all, made more money in baseball than they would have gotten doing something else. Even Bid McPhee, for all of the $2,300 he received in 1887, got a pretty sweet deal, relatively speaking.

Was McPhee severely under-compensated in a historical sense, cheated by a system specifically set up to marginalize his earning power? Goodness yes. But I doubt he or any other man here would’ve traded the experience.

References & Resources

[No salary info on Baseball-Reference.com: Chick Hafey, High Pockets Kelly, Freddie Lindstrom, Tommy McCarthy, Sam Rice, Travis Jackson. Also, I didn’t include Deacon White in this exercise as he’s not officially a Hall of Famer until he gets enshrined this summer.]