The Annotated This Day in Baseball History

I know I do two or three of these a year--maybe two or three a month--but they never fail to both fascinate and amuse me. Musial was coming off something of a down season for him, he hit just .312 with a 134 OPS+ compared to hitting .365 and .347 with OPS+ of 183 and 175 in 1946 and 1947 respectively. Musial's 1946, when the Cards had won the World Series, was a MVP-winning season and he would win the award again in 1948. He settled with his team for a salary of $31,000, in what marked his seventh year in the league. In modern dollars, that's about $250,000 for the season.

Now in the department of "My, how things change!" In 2006, the Cardinals best will be "Prince Albert" Pujols. Pujols is a brilliant hitter and might someday be good enough to pass Musial as the Redbirds' all-time best hitter. (That being said he has a long, long way to go.) Pujols is in the midst of a seven year contract that pays him an average of fourteen million a year, while this is Pujols sixth year in the Majors. In modern dollars then, Pujols is earning--you might want to sit down here--fifty-six times more than Stan Musial.

Fifty-six times. I don't know how that compares to other industries (although I'm guessing plumbers in 2006 don't earn inflation-adjusted fifty-six times more than plumbers in 1948) but it is still a mind-boggling figure. Stan Musial, born too soon.

# posted by Richard Barbieri @ 12:00 PM