MLB Annual Salary Leaders 1874 - 1945

[nat]

Originally Posted by Jobu

Any chance someone wants to adjust for inflation and post modern day equivalents?

Don't have time for all that, but there's an inflation adjuster at the bottom of each player's page on baseball-reference.com

The most Babe Ruth made in 2017 dollars is about $1.3 million.

Fergus Malone's 1874 salary comes out to about $42,000.

Joe Cronin in 1944 made about $367,000.

Cliff Lee's 2015 salary comes out to $25,259,722.

[darwinbulldog]

Originally Posted by nat

Don't have time for all that, but there's an inflation adjuster at the bottom of each player's page on baseball-reference.com

The most Babe Ruth made in 2017 dollars is about $1.3 million.

Fergus Malone's 1874 salary comes out to about $42,000.

Joe Cronin in 1944 made about $367,000.

Cliff Lee's 2015 salary comes out to $25,259,722.

Yeah well, Cliff Lee was better than Fergus Malone.

[packs]

I don't really have a lot of faith in those calculators. It ignores a lot. For example, if Ruth bought an apartment in NYC in 1930 with his money, that apartment value would far exceed whatever the 2017 dollar calculation is today.

[darwinbulldog]

Originally Posted by packs

I don't really have a lot of faith in those calculators. It ignores a lot. For example, if Ruth bought an apartment in NYC in 1930 with his money, that apartment value would far exceed whatever the 2017 dollar calculation is today.

Alternatively, what if he bought a house in Detroit? A house that's now sitting on the market with an asking price of $10,000?

That is, why pick something that's done disproportionately well relative to the rate of inflation, consumer price index, rise in minimum wage, etc. as the means of undermining the validity of the calculator?

I mean, sure he could have bought an apartment in New York, but he could also have bought over a billion dollars in present-day value of vintage baseball cards for the same amount.

[packs]

The calculator is a strict interpretation of past wealth to today's wealth, but like I said it ignores a lot. The purchasing power of $80,000 in 1930 was much higher than it's conversion today. You need only to look at the relative cost of things. In 1930, it cost $400 a year to go to Penn State. In today's dollars that $400 tuition would only amount to $5,863, which would not get you an education at Penn State. In 1930 the average cost of a new home was $7,145. Today that $7,145 equates to just over $100,000, but the average price for a new house is listed as $368,100 by the census.

[nat]

The calculators do ignore a lot, because (as has been amply demonstrated here) inflation affects different goods at different rates. So you can't use the calculators to tell you what kind of a house Ruth could have bought. It's more like, if you bought a random assortment of stuff in 1934 how much would you expect the same random assortment of stuff to cost in 2017. Which you can't use for any precise purpose, but gets you a sort-of-rough idea about how far baseball paychecks used to go. And I take it that "a sort-of-rough idea" is good enough for government work, as well as for posts to baseball card websites.

[oldjudge]

My bad, I was thinking of Denny