I was looking at George Brett's stats on Baseball Reference and I noticed that he made $140,000 the year he hit .390 and was the league MVP in 1980. That was his 7th year in the league , so his salary would not have been team controlled ( I think-- not sure what differences there were in salary structure back then but free-agency started in the mid- 70s. ) $140,000 adjusted for inflation would be about $430K today. The average salary was $143K; it's now about 4 million. The highest salary in 1980 was 1 million (Nolan Ryan--adjusted for inflation that would be about 3 million today. )http://sabr.org/research/mlbs-annual-salary-leaders-1874-2012.
The highest today is about 30 million , with top 100 getting at least 11 million.http://www.spotrac.com/rankings/mlb/

I don't really care about player salaries, I am just curious as to why they have gone up so much and what that says about our economy. Ticket prices have gone up from an average of $4.53 in 1980 to $28.94 this year ($4.53 would be $13.86 today). Attendance has gone up from 43 million to 73 million from 1980 to 2014 as well. So that's a lot of additional revenue . And of course most of the growth has come from TV contracts. http://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/ ... illion-for

So I would hypothesize the following reasons for the huge growth in salaries : (1) baseball players have been able to negotiate good collective bargaining agreements (no salary caps, free agency, etc.), (2) cable companies having monopolies allowing them to pay huge prices for sports content, (3) baseball having a monopoly, which will cause demand to increase with the number of teams staying the same and population growing, (4) corporate money going into buying tickets and into buying ads at an increased rate, given corporate profitability over the past 30-35 years, (5) increased wealth in the top income tiers, allowing for increased expenditures on entertainment..

There's also all the merchandising revenue of course. I'm guessing that's exploded since 1980. In addition to which there's the development of the concept of image rights, which didn't even exist back then but which now has to be factored into every salary negotiation

I'd be interested in seeing the percentage of revenues that went toward player salaries then vs now. If that percentage has remained relatively constant, that means that the overall revenue of the league has gone up while the number of players (25 on a team, and roughly the same number of teams) has remained essentially the same, which would make sense.

If the percentages have changed dramatically, that would be an interesting story.

Has the same happened with other sports? Salaries and transfer fees in football (soccer) have exploded over the past few decades across Europe.

geo

I'd be interested in seeing the percentage of revenues that went toward player salaries then vs now

This is the key.
In negotiating salary caps, most leagues split mandatory sport-specific revenue roughly 50-50 between owners and players. In recent years, players have agreed to accept a smaller slice of the pie. In both the most recent NBA and NHL labor negotiations, players went from receiving 57% of basketball- and hockey-related income to 50% while NFL players went from a 50/50 split to 47%. When factoring in total league revenues, players’ shares are slightly smaller, but roughly equal across sports:
the NFL is here. Its quite complicated, but then they are slicing up an awfully big pie.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101884818

Before the MLB reserve clause was ruled illegal in 1970, MLB players were very poorly paid versus revenues. In fact until that ruling professional athletes in all sports didn't have enough bargaining power to attain the share of revenues they now enjoy.

MLB does not have a salary cap, only a luxury tax. The Yankees are responsible for 95% of all payments into the luxury tax, by the way. And yet they still don't win .

http://priceonomics.com/are-salary-caps ... etes-fair/