Baseball’s Hall of Fame doesn’t care about player salaries
And it shouldn't care
You know what you never see on a Hall-of-Famer’s plaque at Cooperstown? Salary figures.
There has always been scuttlebutt about the highest paid player in the game.
Highest Player Salaries by Decade from Today in Baseball amended slightly
1870’s Al Spaulding - $4,000
1880’s Fred Dunlap, Buck Ewing - $5,000
1890’s Hardy Richardson - $4,000
1900’s Nap Lajoie - $9,000
1910’s Ty Cobb - $20,000
1920’s Babe Ruth $70,000
1930’s Babe Ruth $80,000
1940’s Joe DiMaggio $100,000
1950’s Joe DiMaggio $100,000
1960’s Willie Mays $135,000
1970’s Rod Carew $800,000
1980’s Orel Hershisher/Frank Viola $2,766,667
1990’s Alex Rodriguez $33,000,000
2000’s Alex Rodriguez $33,000,000
2020’s Shohei Ohtani $70,000,000*
*AAV is lower due to deferments
People did care about Babe Ruth’s salary when he played
After Babe Ruth provided a walk-off 1926 game seven victory for the St. Louis Cardinals (their first title,) he signed a three-year contract at $70,000 a year worth a total of $210,000. It was by far the highest salary ever paid to a baseball player.
This came immediately after Ruth was thrown out trying to steal second while the Yankees were trailing 3-2 with two outs in the ninth inning! To be fair, teammate Bob Meusel swung and missed in what might have been a botched hit-and-run play. I can only imagine the stunned silence at Yankee Stadium. At the time the vaunted Yankees had only one World Series championship to their credit. Beginning the next year in 1927, the Bombers would win 19 titles over the next 36 years. And the Babe got paid first.
Three years later in 1930, Ruth tried to justify his now $80,000 salary, which exceed President Herbert Hoover’s $75,000, by famously stating, “I had a better year than he did”. This might be one of my favorite baseball quotes ever. Hoover was struggling with trying to manage the Great Depression.
Baseball players’ salary information is something they appear comfortable sharing with the public. Maybe it’s in part due to penurious owners always trying to find a way to pay them as little as they can get away with, so they need to let fans know?
For the players, going public regarding salary could also be used to show where they stand in the salary/value pecking order amongst their peers. Super-agents like Scott Boras use performance comparisons to make their case that their player is worth more. During his career, the late Pete Rose made it his mission to become the “First $100,000/year singles hitter” in MLB history. While Rose did achieve that goal around 1970, few remember and he’s not in the HOF for other reasons.
But, when you go to Cooperstown at least as far as the plaques are concerned, there’s no mention of remuneration. This is done with intention as the HOF plaques don’t include contract or salary details, financial achievements or off-the-field endorsements. It’s one of the most undervalued positive aspects about visiting the Hall of Fame. Because how much inductees were paid is not a reason baseball fans go to visit! While the voting for HOF candidates has always been a work in progress, the approach to what’s valued (as it should be) has remained baseball performance, the candidate’s legacy and their historical impact.
As you can see in the list above, Fred Dunlap and Hardy Richardson were pre-1900 stars who were the highest paid in the game yet weren’t elected to the Hall-of-Fame, which didn’t open until 40+ years after both of their careers had ended. The others are names you will know, and most (but not all), are HOFers (Alex Rodriguez is a ‘should be’ HOFer), and Shohei Ohtani is a ‘will-be’ HOFer.
This leaves, (besides Dunlap and Richardson), only Orel “Bulldog” Hershiser and Frank “Sweet Music” Viola as the highest-paid players ignored by HOF voters. I frankly did not even remember that either Hershiser or Viola made it to being the highest paid for a particular decade. Correctly, being the highest paid player in baseball is far from a guarantee of future enshrinement. When Bobby Bonilla signed his 5-year $29 million contract in 1991 he was for a brief time the highest paid player. Bonilla got only two votes on his lone year appearing on the ballot in 2007. He’s still being paid by the Mets today more than 35 years later. The Hall-of-Fame never cared and as a Met fan, neither did I.
About the Author: Mark Kolier along with his son Gordon co-hosts a baseball podcast called ‘Almost Cooperstown’. He also has written baseball-related articles that can be accessed on Medium.com and Substack.com.