Happy Leap Day!  Hopefully you’re wearing your yellow and blue and you don’t have to cry too hard for your candy.
A day that only comes around every four years seems like the perfect day to highlight a day in baseball’s history. Â On February 29, 1972, Hank Aaron signed a contract with the Atlanta Braves that made him the highest-paid player in Major League Baseball. Â The amount of the contract? $200,000.
Yes, it was only forty years ago that $200,000 was the biggest contract in baseball.
To give it some perspective, minimum salary for a player in Major League Baseball is currently $480,000.  You could argue that with inflation, cost of living and just the overall improvements in our lives over the last 40 years that Aaron’s $200,000 would probably be worth at least a million dollars in 2012 but the size of Aaron’s contract is still significant.
Before Aaron’s contract, the highest-paid player in baseball was Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski who was making $167,000.  Another life-long Red Sox player, Ted Williams, broke the six-figure barrier with his contract for $105,000 in 1949.  It took Major League Baseball 23 years to go from giving a $100,000 contract to giving a $200,000 contract.  The jump was higher and took less time once free agency was put into place in 1975.  That year, Yankees pitcher Catfish Hunter signed a contract for $750,000 and in 1980 Houston Astros pitcher Nolan Ryan broke the million-dollar mark with a $1.1 million contract.
On January 18th this year, the Texas Rangers, and their CEO Nolan Ryan, signed 25 year-old, right-handed, pitcher Yu Darvish to a six-year, $60 million contract (which doesn’t include the $51.7 million they spent on a posting fee for exclusive negotiating rights with the Japanese hurler).  According to Baseball-Reference.com, Aaron made approximately $1,565.000 in his career. Some of the numbers are vague or missing but it’s clear he didn’t make much more than $2 million total in his 23 seasons in Major League Baseball. In his first year in MLB, Yu Darvish will make $10 million.
That’s some leap.
(Originally published on Examiner.com)