Wednesday, December 11, 2019

From Willie Mays to Gerrit Cole: Major league baseball's annual salary leaders



Gerrit Cole agrees to record nine-year, $324 million deal with Yankees.  (USA Today, 12/11/2019)
Memo to Yankee brass:   Baseball is a team sport.   The Yankees, meanwhile, landed their white whale. They drafted Cole in the first round out of high school in 2008, only to see him attend UCLA. They exercised relative austerity in recent years to wriggle under the competitive balance tax - only to see the likes of James Paxton and J.A. Happ fail to carry them back to the World Series. 
So they went big - and now are counting on Cole to carry them to their first World Series since 2009.

Except in 1966, when Sandy Koufax briefly took over the top spot, Willie Mays earned the highest annual salary in baseball from 1959 to 1970.  (He tied with Mickey Mantle in 1962.)


$946,132.97 is just under 3% of the average annual value of Cole's contract with the Yankees.

No comments:

Post a Comment