Posts tagged baseball

In 2009, Alex Rodriguez finally did what Karl Malone never accomplished, winning a championship while admitting steroid use (not sure if that is a bonus). Winning gets you a lot of love and a little more forgiveness but if he had come up short yet again, there would be a thousand posts just like this one…

In 2009 had a base salary of $33,000,000.
Stats
Games 124
At Bats 444
Runs 78
Hits 127
Doubles 17
Triples 1
Home Runs 30
Walks 80
Strikeouts 97

Final averages: .286/.402/.532

To calculate what he made for each of these categories we’ll take the number of plate appearances and divide it by his base salary:

33,000,000 divided by 524 = $62,977.10 per plate appearance. That means that whether he got a walk or home run or strikeout, he made almost $63 thousand by just stepping into the batter’s box.

Now if you take that and multiply it by the average number of plate appearances per game (4.23) … A-Rod made $266,393.13 for every game he played in 2009 (not including postseason). Now let’s say that the length of an average baseball game in 2009 (I don’t know the exact number) was 3 hours. That means that A-Rod put in 372 hours of salaried work for the Yankees at a rate of $88709.62/hour.

The following chart breaks down where his salary went in 2009:

Click for Larger Image