JUPITER, Fla. - Already Stan Musial was a seven-time batting champ and a three-time Most Valuable Player when, come 1959 or so, he was set to become a first for the National League: a million-dollar player.
That is, a player who had made $1 million total.
Combined.
In his career.
In 1958 and 1959, Musial made $100,000 as the league's highest-paid player, per multiple sources, including Baseball-Reference.com. Those salaries represented a significant hike from the $80,000 a year he made in the previous seven seasons, seasons that included seven top-10 finishes in the MVP voting, two runnerup finishes and two batting titles. In 1959, Musial struggled to a .255 average and a meager 44 RBIs in 115 games. The money he had made from playing baseball was approaching $1 million or had just topped $1 million (depending on the reports) when he did something equally unusual: He asked for a pay cut. Musial lopped off 20 percent of his salary and returned to $80,000 for 1960.
"The Cardinals have been generous to me the past few years," Musial told The Sporting News, as recounted here in this entry at Retro Simba (a modern blog with a distinctly sepia-toned style). "So I thought I'd be kind to them."
Cross-generational salary stories are fraught with peril. It is too easy to over-romance the suppressed salaries of yesteryear and position those players as the All-American, blue-collar ballplayers in comparison to the modern BallPlayer, Inc. That's too oversimplified. More revenue than ever pours into baseball - through TV, through the Web, through sponsorships, through ticket sales, through merchandising - and it's only capitalist that players should benefit from that windfall. Free agency has also afforded them a larger slice (or two) of the pie.
Players still take pay cuts. Brad Penny had to take one this past season after spending a year mostly injured with the Cardinals. Miguel Batista made $9.5 million in 2009 with the Seattle Mariners. He's on a minor-league deal with the Cardinals this spring.
Matching salaries across eras is like comparing apples to Orangutans.
But, boy, it can be fun on a rainy day in Jupiter.
With Albert Pujols and The Great Negotiations filling the airwaves, slowing the servers, and running up the cost of ink, it's an especially gratuitous exercise. Pujols is looking at a salary in the neighborhood of $30 million a year or more. For perspective, that would pay Pujols roughly $42,553.19 per plate appearance. According to history books, Musial made less than that in each of his three MVP seasons, including 1948 when he nearly missed the Triple Crown. Given Pujols' average season, here are some other per-event splits from a $30-million salary:
$42,553.19 per plate appearance
$151,515.15 per hit
$714,285.71 per home run
$234,375.00 per RBIs
$80,645.16 per base
I saw some numbers last night about how much Boston Celtics guard Ray Allen has made per three-pointer on his record run. That of course dismisses all the other things he's done on the court for his salary. Assists? Shoot, he gave those up for free. He was just paid to nail jumpers outside the arc. Same thing here. Obviously, Pujols is paid per single event. Just like calculating that at $100,000, Musial would make $515.46 per hit in his average season or $4,000.00 per homer oversimplifies all the things he did in a lineup.
The real interesting numbers come when you factor in inflation.
Musial's $100,000 salary in 1959 translates into a modern-day salary of $747,228.37, per DollarTimes. The site used a 4.02-percent inflation rate to calculate the sum. Reverse the inflation, and a $30-million salary in today's dollars is worth $4,014,836.94 in 1959 dollars.
Let's round it off to a tidy $4 million.
In 1959 dollars that would be enough to pay 40 Musials. Put another away, that would be enough to put a Musial at every starting position for five different teams. That's fine entire lineups of Musials, with the spare change for a starting pitcher.
There were, of course, only eight NL clubs in 1959.
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