Major League baseball players are among the highest-paid athletes in the world, but this year's crop of top-paid players shows that money doesn't necessarily translate into on-field success.
Baseball’s list of top 10 players by earnings is replete with high-profile stars who make millions in return for providing hope for team owners and fans of World Series championships in the future.
Yet only threeof the top 10 helped their team get into the playoffs and, of those, only one team remains alive with World Series aspirations. One player on the list never even took the field in 2016.
The league’s most expensive players, it turns out, earn between $275,000 and $352,000 for every win their teams record.
One of the possible reasons for this paradox: Many players on the list are on the downside of their career, working on contracts struck at a time when they were in the prime of their production. The top 10 earners aren’t young phenoms with the best years of their career ahead of them—the average age of the top 10 is 33.2 years old. Only one player on the list is under 30 years old.
The top 10 players are listed by their total earnings. When calculating their earnings per win and per start, Financial Advisor has used each player’s 2016 salary.
10. Ryan Howard, $25.6 million
Ryan Howard, 36, was a longtime first baseman with the Philadelphia Phillies, who paid him $25 million in 2016, which was his last year in baseball before retiring. Howard ended up batting .196 in 331 at-bats. The Phillies ended up winning 71 games, finishing fourth place in the National League East. Howard earned about $352,000 per Phillies win.