How much did satchel paige get paid?

Answer 1

Satchel Paige played in the era of Baseball where professional ball players made less then a house cleaner. His last year, in 1965, was the only year that he could make anything more then that. But still then, he made very very very cheap money.

Back in his prime days, he was making around 10-15 bucks, which is equal to today's money at 100 dollars. If that.

If Paige was playing right now, he would be making around 100-200 thousand dollars a year.

Answer 2

It is impossible to accurately assess how much money Satchel Paige made as a baseball player because the majority of his career was spent with teams in the Negro Leagues and playing for teams constructed for special exhibition series. Records for these teams are often incomplete or non-existent. However, his total earnings from these various sources during his prime years almost certainly rank among the highest in the game for his era, surpassing many major league salaries. In his biography of Paige, Satchel,Larry Tye reports that Pittsburgh Crawford's owner Gus Greenlee paid Paige $250 per month (approximately $1500 a season) starting in 1931. This represented just a fraction of his earnings. Paige played year-round and often landed large salaries for single games. In 1931, he also played in the California Winter League, for example. At this time the average annual income in the country was just over $1,300 a year and Paige was earning at least double that despite being African-American in the age of segregation. Tye reports that he left Greenlee's Crawfords for Bismark for a salary of $400 per month in 1935 and then returned to Greenlee a season later for a salary of $600 per month. According to Tye, by the 1940's Paige was earning as much as $40,000 a season as a member of the Kansas City Monarchs, a salary that would have topped almost any player in the major leagues at the time.

Paige was able to command high salaries because unlike major league players at the time, he was a true free agent, able to jump from team to team at will to play for the highest bidder. At this time MLB players were subject to the reserve clause which kept their salaries artificially low. Paige was a huge draw in the 1930s and 40s and at times he would even receive a percentage of the gate for pitching. He would often leave his club to pitch in an exhibition for higher pay and Negro teams found little help from the legal system in enforcing their contracts.