The 100 Million Dollar Contract Over Time

All this recent talk about the contract status of Barry Zito caused me to visit the Cot’s Baseball Contracts page on the most expensive players of all time. Any FanGraphs reader worth their salt already knows this, but there are only 26 players in all of baseball history that have ever been given total contracts worth more than $100M. The first player to break the $100M barrier was Kevin Brown, signing a 7-year, $105M deal before the 1999 season. Since then the barrier has been utterly destroyed, culminating so far in Alex Rodriguez’s recent 10 year, $275M deal (although of course, that could be passed this upcoming offseason by Albert Pujols).

Fangraphs