Why baseball spent more than $1bn on three players in a month
Three of the richest contracts in sports history would appear to bust the baseball-is-dying narrative, but underlying trends have exposed a rot within the mechanics of the sport’s economics
Mike Trout, the Angels’ newly minted $426.5m man, has finished either first or second in Most Valuable Player voting in every full season he’s played. Photograph: Kelley L Cox/USA Today Sports
he three generational talents on Major League Baseball’s free-agent market this winter were always going to cash in big. But the splashy numbers as they came across the wire were enough to leave even veteran observers slack-jawed.
It kicked off in February when Manny Machado agreed to a 10-year, $300m contract with the San Diego Padres. Bryce Harper followed with a 13-year, $330m deal with the Philadelphia Phillies less than two weeks later, the richest contract by total value in North American sports history.
That record stood for all of three weeks as Mike Trout signed a 10-year, $360m extension – creating a 12-year, $426.5 million total commitment – that all but ensures he’ll finish his career with the Los Angeles Angels.
That’s more than $1bn in guaranteed salary for three players, the sort of money that would appear to dramatically counter the persistent narrative of baseball as an outmoded enterprise.
The perennial hand-wringing over baseball’s waning popularity and relevancy amid the hastening pace of American life, a tradition dating back more than a century, is not entirely without merit. Average attendance at major league ballparks hit a 16-year low in 2018. Little League participation is down. A Gallup poll shows baseball, which ceded the practical if not symbolic mantle of national pastime to the NFL decades ago, is falling behind basketball in popularity among fans in the United States.