In the 2023 offseason, MLB teams collectively spent almost $3.7 billion in free agency. Needless to say, that’s a ton of money. But in order to fully comprehend that total, we need to understand how baseball got to this point. Players haven’t always been compensated royally for their efforts, and they’ve spent plenty of time fighting against various salary repression tactics. The timeline below will take you through history, highlighting events that have forever altered the composition of MLB contracts.
Over more than 150 years, baseball has seen four failed player unions, three consecutive offseasons marred by collusion, multiple work stoppages, and a Peter Seitz ruling that completely changed the fabric of the game. Free agency has progressed through a championship-cancelling strike, a pandemic, and a lockout to produce the most lucrative contracts ever seen. The leap from Levi Meyerle’s $1,500 contract in 1870 (roughly $35,000 in today’s money) to the $500+ million Shohei Ohtani projects to receive would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, but it proves that the National Pastime is alive and well.
It’s hard to predict where the game will go from here. I would surmise that Ohtani’s new contract becomes the high-water mark for at least a decade, simply because no one has a skill set like he does. But if the game keeps growing in the way that it has, one has to expect Ohtani’s anticipated deal to be surpassed sometime in the not-so-distant future.