Willie Mays’s salary
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As I walk through this wicked world, searching for light in the darkness of insanity, I find it’s important to occasionally focus on something like Willie Mays’s salary:
Yes my graphs are terrible so don’t bother to point that out.
Notes:
(1) Mays was the highest-paid player in the major leagues in every season from 1959 through 1970, with the exception of 1966, when Sandy Koufax made the equivalent of almost exactly one million dollars in 2018 money. Koufax extracted this from the Dodgers after a bitter holdout, and his arm fell off immediately afterwards, which was no doubt taken as a sign of divine or Randian retribution by major league owners. The Major League Players Association, the game’s first officially recognized union, received legal certification in that year as well.
(2) Toward the end of this period Mays was making about five times more than the average major league salary (Average salary data aren’t available for the earlier parts of Mays’s career.) The highest-paid player today — Clayton Kershaw — makes about eight times more than the average salary.
(3) During the entire span of Mays’s career, players were stuck with the reserve clause, a provision in the standard player contract that allowed a team to unilaterally renew a player’s contract at its expiration, at whatever terms the team chose. A player’s only recourse was to hold out, i.e., to refuse to play. Under normal circumstances this would be an egregious violation of the antitrust laws, but the Supreme Court had ruled in 1922 that, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, “giving exhibitions of base ball” didn’t constitute interstate commerce, so major league contracts weren’t subject to federal antitrust laws.
This was not a completely unsupportable conclusion at the time, given the extant precedents regarding interstate commerce, but it became a bizarrely anachronistic holding soon after the SCOTUS started enforcing the modern interpretation of the commerce clause in the 1930s. Yet the Court refused to reverse its 1922 holding, first in the 1950s, and then infamously in 1973, in the Curt Flood case, which features one of the most absurd opinions in SCOTUS history. (The gist of the holding is that Americans — and most especially Harry Blackmun — love baseball so much that the sport cannot survive as an economic activity without special legal protections for the teams’ owners).
(4) In inflation-adjusted terms, Babe Ruth’s salaries were vastly higher than those made by any other player up to that time, and remained higher than those received by any other player for several decades afterwards. Ruth’s highest nominal salary was $80,000 in 1930 and 1931 — when somebody pointed out this was more than President Hoover was making, Ruth supposedly replied, “well, I had a better year” — but his highest salary in constant dollars was actually in 1932, when his $75,000 compensation translating into $1.376 million in 2018 money. This figure would not be exceeded until Mike Schmidt signed one of the first free agent contracts in 1977.
(5) Kershaw’s 2017 salary of $33,000,000 is almost exactly identical to the collective inflation-adjusted player payrolls of every National League team in 1967.