Some historical perspective from Joe Posnanski's blog:
"On March 8, 1930, Babe Ruth signed a two-year, $160,000 contract with the New York Yankees. This is probably the first famous sports contract in American history, but what is not as well remembered is that Ruth actually settled for that contract. He had stubbornly held out for months and had already turned down this exact contract. He wanted a three-year deal at $85,000 a year.
But as spring training began, Ruth began to waver. Sportswriters were in his ear telling him that owner Jacob Ruppert — famously known as “the Colonel” — would never give in to his demands and that $80,000 was a whole lot of money.
And on March 8, Ruth showed up at the Yankees’ spring training facility in St. Petersburg, Fla. — in cream-colored golf knickers, gray stockings, black-and-white-striped shoes and a dark jacket, according to the New York Daily News — and humbly tapped Ruppert on the shoulder and said: “My dear Colonel, could I see you for about 10 minutes?”
Five minutes later, they emerged from the meeting and Ruppert grandiosely pronounced: “Gentlemen, all I have to say is that Mr. Ruth has agreed to that two-year contract.”
At which point, Ruth reportedly said: “Hell’s bells? What time is it? Quarter after one? Hey, I gotta beat it to the ballpark!”
It was the biggest sports contract ever signed to that point — about $1.35 million in today’s dollars about $10,000 more per year than Ruth had been making. The big-city and small-town newspapers across the country — to offer some perspective about how much money that was — pointed out that Ruth would be drawing $5,000 more per year than President Herbert Hoover himself.
As the years went on, the contrast between Ruth’s salary and Hoover’s led to one of baseball’s all-time stories, one you’ve probably heard. Supposedly, Ruth was confronted with the fact that he would be getting paid more than President Hoover. He huffed and responded, “Hell, why not? I had a better year than he did.”
Not to be a party pooper, but that probably never happened. For one thing,
I cannot find an instance of Ruth saying it; the story didn’t emerge until the late 1940s, when Ruth was dying. In fact, the story only emerged because New York sportswriter Tom Meany kept telling it in his banquet speeches. In Meany’s version of the story, it was actually Ruppert himself who had told Ruth that he couldn’t pay him that much money because it was more than the President of the United States, to which Ruth replied, in some form, “So what? I had a better year.” But we can be almost entirely certain that didn’t happen; Ruth was not that sort of conversationalist and, as we know, Ruppert readily offered him $80,000 per year and Ruth turned it down.
My guess is that Meany came up with the funny line himself during some bull session with other sportswriters and then attributed it to Ruth because it sounded better that way.
Anyway, to the point: In 1930, Babe Ruth made $5,000 more per year than the President of the United States.
In 2024, Shohei Ohtani will make — I kid you not — 175 times more than the President of the United States.
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