Presidential versus baseball salaries

There’s a famous story that when Babe Ruth was paid the then-staggering sum of $80,000 by the Yankees in 1930, an ink-stained wretch exclaimed to him that this was more than President Hoover was making. To which the Bambino supposedly replied, “Well, I had a better year.”

Ruth in fact was far more highly paid than any other player, in real dollar terms, for the entire first century of major league baseball’s existence: Not until Mike Schmidt signed one of the first big contracts of the free agent era in 1977 did any player make more than Ruth was making in the 1920s and 1930s, in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Meanwhile, Back in the Day presidents of the USA were far more highly paid than they are in our present penurious era, even without considering such customs as pilfering the White House expense account and stuffing the cash into a safe in a Midwestern bank. Hence the journalist’s shock at Ruth’s Ruthian contract.

Let’s go to the stat sheet:

Relative proportion between the highest paid player in baseball’s annual salary and that of the POTUS

1876: Al Spalding made 8% as much as Ulysses S. Grant

1906: Nap Lajoie made 17% as much as Teddy Roosevelt

1916: Ty Cobb made 26.7% as much as Woodrow Wilson

1922: Babe Ruth made 69.3% as much as Warren Harding

1927: Babe Ruth made 93.3% as much as Calvin Coolidge

1930: Babe Ruth made 6.7% more than Herbert Hoover

Note again that Ruth was vastly higher paid than any other player of his era. Thus:

1935: Lou Gehrig made 41.3% as much as FDR

1940: Hank Greenberg made 46.7% as much as FDR

1945: Joe Cronin and Lou Boudreau each made 33.3% as much as FDR/Harry Truman

1950: Joe DiMaggio made exactly the same salary as Harry Truman

No baseball player would make as much as the president again until

1963: Willie Mays made 5% more than JFK/LBJ

Mays would continue to make between 5% and 35% more than the president until:

1969: Willie Mays made 67.5% as much as Richard Nixon

The next time a baseball player made as much as the president was:

1973: Dick Allen made exactly the same salary as Richard Nixon (I really like this one on multiple levels)

1975: Hank Aaron made 20% more than Gerald Ford

Free agency arrived in 1976 and it was off to the races:

1977: Mike Schmidt made 180% more than Jimmy Carter

1980: Nolan Ryan made 400% more than Jimmy Carter

1985: Mike Schmidt made 948.5% more than Ronald Reagan

1990: Robin Yount made 1500% more than GHW Bush

1995: Cecil least appropriate last name ever Fielder made 4519% more than Bill Clinton

2000: Kevin Brown (wut?) made 7757% more than Bill Clinton

2005: Alex Rodriguez made 6400% more than George W. Bush

2010: Alex Rodriguez made 8150% more than Barack Obama

2019: Stephen Strasburg made 9483% more than Donald Trump

2021: Mike Trout made 9175% more than Joe Biden

Presidential salaries:

$50,000 per year 1873-1909

$75,000 per year 1909-1949

$100,000 per year 1949-1969

$200,000 per year 1969-2001

$400,000 per year 2001 to present

Inflation adjusted presidential salaries, 2021 dollars

1876: $1,317,000

1909: $1,976,000

1949: $1,178,000

No wonder Harry had to pocket the silverware.

1969: $1,531,000

2001: $642,702