Tracking how much Red Sox players have made per game so far this season

A topic on 98.5 the Sports Hub's midday show, Zolak and Bertrand sparked an interest in me.

The two co-hosts, Scott Zolak and a voice filling in for Mark Bertrand whose voice I couldn’t figure out and didn’t stay long enough to hear their name, talked about Major League Baseball attracting more players to its Home Run Derby by offering $1 million to its winner. The show’s producer, Jim Louth, introduced the topic, which eventually turned into Zolak shooting the idea down. When Louth stated that the winner would make $1 million for two hours of work, Zolak stated that players make that anyway. Louth quickly shot that notion down.

Obviously, Zolak was wrong. Anybody can do the math in their head to prove that if a player makes as much at $30 million, and because teams expect positional players to play in 150 games or so, a positional player will play between 450-600 hours of baseball per year. That’s $50,000 an hour for someone making $30 million per year and less, obviously, for someone that makes less. Pitchers don’t make much more or less.

The topic made me wonder though: How much does each Red Sox player really make per hour or per game?

Well, I did the math out. Some numbers initially surprised me, such as Andrew Benintendi making $4,125.30 per game played as well as David Price making $955,263.16 per game played. 

I performed the math for each Red Sox player on the 25 man roster as well as important players currently on the disabled list (Christian Vazquez, Dustin Pedroia, Drew Pomeranz, etc.).

Before I share with you how much each Red Sox player made per game played, I have to share with you how I figured each number and some aberrations to the formula.

So, to get dollars earned per game played, I factored that 98 games played is 60 percent of the season. Therefore, each player will have received 60.5 percent of their salary and thus, is divided amongst each game played. Here is an example.

Andrew Benintendi will earn $605,000 this season according to spotrac.com. 60.5 percent of that number becomes $375,402.50. Benintendi has played in 91 games this season, therefore $375,402.50 gets spread across 91 games, which equates to $4,125.30 per game played. In math terms:

$605,500 x .605 / 91 = $4,125.30.

Of course, some aberrations occur, such as Ryan Brazier earning $82,431.25 per game played. It’s unrealistic because Brazier earns a portion of his $545,000 only when he is on the Major League roster. Brazier has been on the Red Sox 25 man roster for only 10 days and has appeared in four games. So of course his salary per game is crooked and not reflective of his actual salary. Also, pitchers appear in less games than positional players and starting pitchers even less than relievers. If a pitcher and batter both make $1 million and the pitcher pitches in 50 games and the batter plays in 150 games, of course the batter will make less per game even though they make the same amount of money and most likely spent the same amount of time on the 25 man roster. So it is not an exact science, but it’s pretty darn close. I created this spreadsheet for your enjoyment, which depicts how much each Red Sox player has earned per game played. Salaries are based on spotrac.com and rounded to the nearest hundredth.
You can access the spreadsheet here