Salary
Average Salary: $3,730,000
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $155,720,040
If you make it to the majors, your salary is going to be good, even if you're sitting in the bullpen for all but three pitches a game. If you don't make the pros, your salary will not be so good—it'll be really, really bad.
Most professional baseball players will never pull in the tens of millions that your favorite sultans of swing make in a single year. On the bright side, the minimum salary in the MLB is half a million dollars, and the average big-league salary is a little over three million per year (source).
Considering the average career in the majors lasts a little more than five years, you can expect to make at least a couple million in a relatively short span of time.
But not so fast—what if you get stuck in the minors? That's where the baseball dream becomes a disappointing reality. Many minor league players are literally impoverished by federally-established poverty levels (source).
Every year that you sign up for the baseball team in hopes of making baseball your life's moneymaking venture, you're betting against a pretty good chance that you'll be living from paycheck to paycheck. Are you really willing to work for years at a job with a less-than-one-percent chance of promotion, one that pays less than a high school kid makes flipping burgers at McDonald's?
You are if you want to live this particular dream.