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. 

Regardless of which team from Texas wins the AL West, it will be historic, but maybe not for the right reasons. While I still haven't fully forgiven the Astros for 2017, I did think it was pretty hilarious that owner Jim Crane went on record saying that it didn't matter his team had cheated because the team was so good they would've won anyway. 

All that aside, the real juice of this article is a look at how both Texas and Houston will make history this season... by winning their division with a negative run differential. With three games left to play each, the Rangers anxiously sport a -40 run differential, and the Astros are lugging around a remarkable -51. 

Given just these two numbers, my money would be on Texas to win the division, but getting baseball down to one number is very difficult, no matter how hard many smart people try; sometimes I think WAR was just invented to help MLB market Mike Trout.

Naturally, I wanted to see how rare this was, and it's actually quite rare. I used Screwball to help me find that only 12 teams with negative r-diffs have even made the playoffs. If we cut out the shortened 2020 season (these teams are displayed in lighter font in the table below), that number goes down by 25% to only nine teams (Honorable mention to the Reds, who made the playoffs in 2020 with an r-diff of exactly zero).

Of those nine non-COVID teams, six of them were division winners (denoted with an asterisk in the table): the 2025 Guardians, 2005 Padres, 2007 Diamondbacks, 1997 Giants, 1987 Twins, 1984 Royals. If the Astros theoretically finished the season and won the division today, they would have the lowest run differential ever of a division winner, and the second lowest ever of a playoff team; Texas would be second for a division winner, and third for a playoff team. 

Out of the nine times it's happened, 33% have occurred in the last three years, with this year's final pushing those number to 10 times, and 40%. While we can blame expanded playoffs for this to a degree, we can't logically use that when a division winner has a negative r-diff, like Cleveland did last year and the AL West winner will this year. That's two years in a row of something that only happened eight times in baseball history before 2025.

So, what causes this to occur? It's not always super easy to tell. For example, the Guardians in 2025 played great defense with no offense, whereas the Astros in 2026 have decent offense but precipitous run prevention, and the Rangers are in the more of a middle area. It's usually more indicative of a lucky team being pushed to the top of a weak division, though that wasn't the case in 2007. The Diamondbacks won the NL West with a -20 r-diff, with the Rockies coming in second by half a game, despite sporting a r-diff of +103. However, the Rockies would end up knocking out the Diamondbacks in a legendary winner-take-all Wild Card playoff contest that ended with a score of 9-8 after 13 innings.

Now that we've seen something like this happen two years in a row, I wonder if this is the new normal. It will be interesting to keep tabs on how teams with negative run differentials perform in the playoffs. 

Of the 12 teams listed above, only one has ever gone on to win the World Series; the 1987 Minnesota Twins. They did finish with a winning record and Kirby Puckett, two things that neither the Rangers or Astros currently have.

Today, Chicago White Sox SS Colson Montgomery set the AL single season strikeout record with his 223rd strikeout. This dubious honor was previously held by none other than the great Adam Dunn, who struck out 222 times in 2012. 223 also matches the MLB record, set by Mark Reynolds in 2009. Montgomery does have fewer plate appearances than both of those guys did in their historic seasons, so if we were to compare these three seasons by rate basis, he'd already be the king. And the season isn't even over yet!

I know the title says HR and OPS, but let's talk strikeouts as a quick warm up. The table below shows the top 10 strikeout seasons of all time. It should be a surprise to no one that all of these seasons came in the 2000s, but is kind of surprising that 40% of the seasons on this list came from guys who play or played shortstop. I was expecting all DH, 1B, and the big corner outfielder types.

While Montgomery is a quality player on an intriguing White Sox ball club, this is likely not the step the South Side brass expected after he put up 21 HR and an .804 OPS over his first 71 big league games. Whenever a player clubs 10 more home runs than he did in the previous year, we would generally expect to see a large jump in OPS as well. In Montgomery's case, his OPS has fallen below .700. 

After his production as a rookie last year, Montgomery was probably seen as one of the biggest threats in the White Sox offense for 2026 , so it would make sense that teams would come back in year two with a more concrete game plan to get him out. The sophomore slump happens to players all the time for a reason.

The point of this article isn't to dunk on this talented young infielder by any means, but instead to highlight a highly irregular type of season in baseball history; a year where a player has an OPS below .700, but 30 or more homers.

Yep, it has only happened 3 times in major league baseball history, with two/thirds of those instances occurring within the last decade. I'm not sure they cared too much about OPS in 1986, but I'd imagine most people thought this sort of thing would never happen again. Now, by comparison, it's downright common (once in over hundred years, and then twice in 9 years). These sort of rare-things-becoming-not-so-rare really helps support the notion of how power-heavy the game has gotten - getting hits has never been harder, so teams have to find ways to make their good hits count, and they're willing to sacrifice a lot of conventional baseball thought in order to do so. 

Before we move on, it's worth mentioning that even though he hit 35 home runs, 1986 was actually Dave Kingman's last season in the big leagues. If he had put up this same line in 2026, I'd be you he'd have at least 10 offers on the table, despite being 37 years old. Back in 1986, front offices didn't seem to want to trade the Sky King's high HR totals for all the flaws that went along with them. Now, that kind of player evaluation is the name of the game.

Now, let's open the field a bit more, to all players with an OPS below .700 and 25+ homers.

Still pretty rare, but not as rare. It has happened eight times in MLB, with a heavy emphasis on 21st century baseball. The first three happened roughly 20 years apart, and then when 2010 hit, it just started happening every few years. Six, or 75% of these occurrences, happened after Y2K. That's not as drastic as the 30 HR guys, but it still shows the same patterns. 

Speaking of patterns, when I look at this data, the main thing I can take away from this is these players all tend to have low batting averages, low on-base percentages, and relatively low slugging percentages, given their HR totals. Putting that together, they simply didn't make contact with the ball enough to record the doubles they needed to boost their slugging percentage, while providing very little at the plate in regards to free passes. Interestingly, many all-stars such as Max Muncy and the aforementioned Adam Dunn record high home run totals with low averages, but also put up massive OBP numbers to go along with them. We saw the rise of the three true outcome player in the early 2000s - will we see the rise of the two true outcome player in 2027 and beyond?