Baseball salaries keep getting higher and higher. Records are set every offseason now. Eventually, there will be a one billion dollar player.

If you think about the direction the world is going, it does sort of start to make sense. Players are increasingly becoming products off the field, not just on. While this is nothing new - the best players always got endorsement deals - with the rise of social media, every player has a chance to go viral. And savvy marketing teams are working every day to maximize those chances.

If done right, players can make a team money in many more ways than by just playing a sport. There's merchandise sales, social media engagement, public appearances, leverage in TV deals, team sponsorships, jersey patches, the list goes on. It explains why a team like the Dodgers can pay Kyle Tucker 60MM a year. They literally play baseball in Hollywood's backyard, and like the other big Hollywood industry, they can risk paying big money for what a star can bring to their ticket sales. Essentially, a terrible film with a lot of star power is still going to make you some dough.

Ownership is generally pretty hesitant to sign these big deals, especially when teams like the Rays can be successful without participating in high priced free agent sweepstakes - though I do suppose the recent long-term contract Tampa Bay has signed wasn't exactly risk-averse, in retrospect.

I wanted to take a look at how valuable these giant contracts actually are, or at least how the biggest ones panned out in 2026. Today we'll look at hitters, but we'll likely do the same analysis for pitchers as well later on. 

Below is a graph showing the 12 highest paid hitters from 2026. To be included in this list, you had to play over 130 games and not be considered a baseball unicorn. These salaries range from 27.27MM (Turner) to 60MM (Tucker), and rank the player on how much OPS+ he put up in 2026 per 1 million dollars paid, hereby referred to as OPS+ per $1M.

That's actually really rough to see. The two biggest contracts are BY FAR the least valuable by measure of how much OPS+ the hitter added per $1 million on his salary. 

While Tucker and Bichette are behind the proverbial eight ball given how high their salaries were to begin with, it's still not great. Even if these two guys were making a more reasonable 30MM a year, they both still have an OPS+ below 100. 

To look a little deeper, a player making 30MM a year would need to put up 3.33 OPS per $1M to be an average hitter at 100 OPS+. If we adjust Tucker and Bichette's salaries to 30MM, they'd still fall short with an OPS+ per $1M marks of 3.24 and 3.07, respectively. 

While you can chalk it up to these two guys getting used to their new surroundings, neither player really has that much time given the length of their deals. They better get cooking, or risk the unforgiving ire of their fanbases. 

While Tucker and Bichette are the two of the worst deals in 2026, they are not the only bad ones on this list. Of the 12 players listed above, only seven were considered league average hitters. Obviously this is a small sample size of just one season, but it shows that if you are committing a massive amount of money to a player, you have around a 50/50 shot that he might not even be an average hitter in a given season. Those are not good odds. And you can't even blame age here: of the five guys with an OPS+ below 100, only Machado and Turner are over 30 years old. 

And remember, these numbers are only for the guys who actually played this year. Seven other players making over $27M didn't even make our list, because they didn't play enough games to qualify. To their credit, pretty much everyone here who didn't quit baseball actually did well this year. Lindor wasn't his usual self, but he was still above average.

That means that out of the 20 richest hitters in baseball, only seven played a full season at an average or higher level. Pay one guy a massive portion of your entire year's payroll, and 65% of the time he'll be largely unavailable or be below average. I'm all for players getting paid what they deserve, but it's information like this that helps me understand why front offices can be a bit skittish to sign these deals, especially the ones with lower budgets. 

Luckily, even though he didn't play much this year, a guy like Judge is almost certainly worth it to the NYY front office given all the things we talked about at the beginning of this article; even when he's off the field, his presence on the team prints money for the Yankees. Same with Soto for the Mets, and Mookie for the Dodgers. Safe to say that there are not a lot of folks buying Rendon jerseys in Anaheim, though.

One last thought. There is something very Mets to be said about the Queens braintrust passing on the most valuable high priced player, Alonso, only to sign the second-least most valuable high priced player in Bichette, especially when we all know how much Pete didn't want to leave Queens. It is hard to feel too bad for the Mets though, when owner Steve Cohen made 3.4 billion last year alone. It's a nice reminder to see that money really can't buy you everything, but I am really glad he's one of the few owners who really seems to be trying to win.