Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
So, I saw an article in the online edition of Sporting News this morning (http://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/average-mlb-salary-falls-for-only-fourth-time-in-50-years-first-time-since-200/y0pslbvbu9pf1u16kb4mubxt8) that said the average major league salary for 2018 was about 4.52 MILLION dollars. Since I'd not yet finished my first cup of coffee I stared at that number for a minute and then said "that doesn't make sense." My reasoning was this: there are somewhere over 900 MLB players (30 teams, 25 players each, plus all the players on the diabled list) and a few of them make enormous salaries - more than $20 million a year, while the minimum MLB salary is a paltry $545,000. By the way, the highest paid MLB player in 2018 is Mike Trout of the Anaheim Angels at a cool $33.25 million and the top 25 players in the league all make more than $22 million. So, $4.52 million as an indication of what the "average" MLB player makes seems way off the mark. And after some more digging I discovered I was correct. While the AVERAGE salary is $4.52 million, the MEDIAN salary is a meager $1.5 million. This is a much more accurate indicator of what MLB players actually are making. Now, nearly every article I found on my Google search reported the average salary figure and I had to dig around quite a bit to find the median. It strikes me that the stories that just reported the average salary were slanted towards the "wow MLB players make way too much money" opinion, and they emphasized the average deliberately (IMHO) because that number was so much higher than the median value.
Just goes to show you that you should always think about what you're reading in any media. (And just to say that I would have played for just one year at that average salary; just pick a position. Really. 😎).
