When Alex Rodriguez signed a $252 million contract in 2000, some people could not fathom a professional baseball player making that much money. Twenty years later, contracts entered the $400 million stratosphere, thanks to Mike Trout's 2019 deal. Less than five years later, Shohei Ohtani came along and signed a record-breaking 10-year $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers in December 2023. How many more years will it be before we see the first $1 billion baseball contract?
For now, let's dive into the numbers at hand. To uncover the richest MLB players, Stacker consulted Celebrity Net Worth and ranked the world's baseball players by their latest net worth figures, as of Aug. 19, 2024. The net worth figures in this list were calculated using a proprietary formula that factored in all publicly available data about each person, including salaries, real estate holdings, divorces, record sales, royalties, and endorsements—minus estimated taxes, manager's fees, agent fees, and lifestyle expenses. Other information, such as career spans, nationalities, salary data, and stats came from Baseball-Reference.com.
We included notable career achievements, sources of wealth, and post-baseball ventures of some of the older players on the list. Some players have gone the common route by investing in restaurants, real estate, or even entering the television booth. Others have sought to invest in tech startups, social media platforms, and hunting and outdoor shows.
Because of the relative newness of some of baseball's current biggest deals, some active stars did not qualify, and older players with more years of accumulated wealth still earn more, according to Celebrity Net Worth's data.
Read on to find out which baseball superstar outearns the rest.
