Ballparks are filled with fans. The season will stretch to a full 162 games. The centerpiece All-Star Game will return Tuesday, a year after the pandemic killed it along with most of the baseball traditions that have filled the American summer for more than a century.
It’s back to business as usual in Major League Baseball, and that’s putting record paychecks on the board for the game’s top stars.
MLB’s ten highest-paid players will collectively earn an all-time high of $357 million this season, a giant leap from last year’s $152 million, when the season was shortened to 60 games and players’ salaries cut by 63%. The combined total is also up more than 13% from 2019’s $315 million thanks to a slew of huge contracts handed out over the past couple of years.
New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor tops this year’s list with $45.3 million in total earnings for 2021, including endorsements, followed by Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer ($39 million), Los Angeles Angels center fielder Mike Trout ($38.5 million) and New York Yankees ace Gerrit Cole ($36.5 million). Rounding out the top five is Houston Astros pitcher Justin Verlander, who is making $34.2 million but is expected to miss the entire season as he recovers from Tommy John surgery.
Lindor, Trout and Cole are among the eight players in baseball with active contracts valued at $300 million or more, with Trout’s $426.5 million deal signed in 2019 the largest in baseball history. All but one of those contracts have been signed in the last two and a half years.
The cash is flowing to the elite thanks to richer national TV deals that pay the league an annual average of $1.55 billion—a figure that is double the average under the previous contracts, which ran through 2013, and is set to rise again to $1.84 billion under new seven-year deals that begin next season. For most players, though, there isn’t as much to celebrate: The average and median MLB salaries are trending down, with an Associated Press analysis in April highlighting the earnings stratification with the finding that 100 of the league’s 902 players will earn more than half of all salary money this season, up from 42.5% in 2017. Hitting further into the lower levels of the sport, MLB pared its number of minor league affiliates to 120 clubs this season, from 162, eliminating hundreds of players from its talent pipeline.
Making matters worse are the relatively limited opportunities baseball players have off the field. Shohei Ohtani will earn an MLB-best $6 million from endorsements this year, according to Forbes estimates, a figure that would barely land him among the NBA’s top 20. By comparison, LeBron James, basketball’s No. 1 pitchman, earned $65 million off the court while the NFL’s top endorser, Tom Brady, pulled in $31 million. Even big-name baseball stars like Cole and Stephen Strasburg have been unable to crack seven figures in endorsements. They can blame baseball’s regionalism, an older and less tech-savvy fan base and a marketing strategy that generally favors teams over players, who also must deal with a more grueling schedule than their counterparts in other leagues.
“It’s a hell of a long season,” says Joe Favorito, a veteran sports marketing consultant. “You have natural gaps in every other sport where if players want to do things off the field, whether it’s community events or promotions, there’s time to do that. There’s no time to do that in baseball.”
All of that, along with the glacial pace of free agency in recent years, will be the backdrop of contentious negotiations between the owners and the players’ union for a new collective bargaining agreement, with the current pact expiring in December. Many in the sport anticipate baseball’s first work stoppage in more than a quarter-century.
For now, baseball’s elite can only dream of the day when the endorsement dollars start to match the playing contracts, although a few green shoots offer hope in the form of a crop of young stars that includes Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. and San Diego Padres shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. Perhaps their popularity both in the U.S. and abroad will tantalize advertisers in a way their predecessors couldn’t—or perhaps Ohtani will blossom into the icon the sport has long sought. But it will take time.
“It’s not something that can happen in one or two years,” says Favorito. “It has to be a concerted effort made by the players, the Players Association and the league that you’re going to market stars in ways that you never have been before.”