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MLB Pay Disparity is Way More Unethical Than You Think

By Ian Anderson

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred speaking at the Baseball Winter Meetings in San Diego.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred speaking at the Baseball Winter Meetings in San Diego. / Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images

We all know how bad the disparity between the top earners in the MLB and the rest of the league was, but we doubt anybody knew it was this bad.

According to the financial information released earlier on Thursday, there's a prohibitively wide pay gap among the 50 highest-paid players and everyone else.

Those top-50 players earn over 10 times as much money as everyone else who spent at least one day on a MLB roster. But this is nothing new. Remember the whole "livable wages" argument for minor league players pretty much earning nothing? It was a debated topic in Congress this past year!

And yes, we understand the best players in the game deserve the most money, but let's not forget there are some unjustly paid over others. Have we looked at the Eric Hosmer/Justin Smoak argument from earlier today?

One who lives by advanced analytics would argue Smoak is the better player, and he's making A LOT less than his counterpart.

And let's not even get into last year's offseason, which saw some of the game's biggest names sign in March or even DURING the regular season. Commissioner Manfred has stated this as an issue, but there needs to be results, not just words.

The MLB easily has the money to make the changes necessary, both at the major and minor league level -- it's just a matter of whether or not they actually decide to do so.