Like any good baseball nerd, I was trying to figure out just how to contextualize just what a bargain the Cardinals are getting paying John Lackey only 500K this season. After all, he’s a bulldog who’s pitched 117 innings in the postseason alone (posting a 3.08 ERA, BTW).
Plus he’s just the right type of intense:
OK, John Lackey is one bad man. He just talked his way into staying in a spring training game. Seriously #cardinals #stlcards
— Derrick Goold (@dgoold) March 22, 2015
We’ll have lots of time to get around to Lackey’s contract this season, as it’s bound to come up that a pitcher worthy a 15M+ the past 5 seasons is all of a sudden making the MLB minimum. So patience.
But here are a couple of nuggets I did find…
The highest paid player in 2015 will be Clayton Kershaw at 32M. I’m not a banker, so could someone tell me what the ROI on this is?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tHa63o9ujA
Or this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7Aa8HdS6Dk
He probably deserves it. And the Dodgers can afford it. Still, how fun was it to watch those clips again?
I also came across this article in the Belleville News-Democrat about the best contract (for a team) in baseball history:
Perhaps all this talk of seven- and eight-figure salaries has you longing for the time when players truly competed for the love of the game — because that’s about all they got. My talk about big money, for example, prompted News-Democrat Sports Editor Todd Eschman to remember once writing about the lowest-paid player he ever found in the history of baseball: one William Van Winkle “Chicken” Wolf.
If you’re wondering about the nickname, it reportedly was hung on him as a teenager while he and eventual big-league teammate Pete Browning were playing for Wolf’s hometown semi-pro Louisville Eclipse team. Their manager had warned the team to eat lightly before playing, but Wolf stuffed himself with stewed chicken one day just before going out and making several errors in that day’s game. Browning made the connection, and Wolf was forever known as “Chicken.”
Even so, he turned out to be a whale of a bargain, Eschman said. Despite a salary of just $9 per week for the Louisville Colonels in 1890, Wolf led the American Association in hits (197) and batting average (.363) in addition to scoring 100 runs and knocking in 98 more. It was easily the finest season in his 11-year career, which included a year with the St. Louis Brown Stockings (precursors to the Cardinals) in 1891. Of course, at that salary, Wolf had to find another line of work when he retired after the 1893 season. He wound up dying in 1903 at age 41 from injuries suffered while responding to a call with the Louisville Fire Department.
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