What 4-A Player Make

Thanks to mlbtraderumors.com and Cot’s Baseball Contracts, I learned today that minor league players with at least one day of major league service time or who have been on a team’s 40-man roster for at least two years make a minimum annual salary of $65,000.

That’s more than I thought, but it does explain why this past off-season a number of marginal veteran players signed minor league contracts between about $70,000 and $85,000 for time spent in the minors and about nine times that amount for times spent on the signing team’s major league roster.

It also explains why so many 4-A players stick around in AAA ball nowadays, rather than getting on with their lives.  For a man in his late 20’s or early 30’s getting paid $65K to play baseball beats most other forms of gainful employment.

It also explains why veteran 4-A players make at least $200K (usually more) if they play in Japan.  The Japanese teams have to beat what the 4-A players can make here for them to travel across the world and submerse themselves in a totally foreign country.

Obviously, one of the lures of playing in Japan for as little as $200,000 or $300,000 is the hope that if a player becomes a star there, he can make a lot more.  About $ 6 million seems to be about the most anyone, foreign or native, is making playing in Japan this year.