Can anyone tell me the full story on athletes getting bonuses for making it to the postseason? I know a lot of athletes have contracts giving them extra $ for this, but I have this notion that there is also an automatic payment made to each player on the winning World Series team, and I was wondering:
How much?
Is this only for the WS winners, or is it for division and league champs as well?
What about other sports? (I’m pretty ignorant about anything but baseball.)
Every sport awards extra cash to players based on whether their team makes postseason play and how far they advance. The money comes out of the revenue earned by playing and broadcasting the postseason games. I don’t know the complete scale of payments for every sport, but I have an idea that if your team wins the championship you get something in the neighborhood of $200,000, which is chump change to a lot of players. I suspect that if you went to the web site for each league you could find out.
Baseball admits relatively few teams to the playoffs, and as a result, at one time shared postseason revenue with teams that didn’t make it, based on regular season finish. I don’t know whether they still do since they expanded the playoffs to eight teams. I think the non-wild-card second place finishers still get a small allowance.
Some players do have provisions in their contracts calling for additional bonuses, but this isn’t terribly common. Generally an individual player contract provides bonuses only for individual performance, since the league payment already rewards team success.
In baseball, at least, the players’ money comes only from postseason ticket revenue. The exact amount therefore will vary from year to year. Then, too, each team divides up its share and has to vote on how to handle players who played for the team part of the year, so this also will affect the individual shares.
And I was right, non-wild card second place teams get a share of the pot, but it’s a pittance.
“Here’s the breakdown: $17,000 per player for the divisional playoff game; $34,500 per player for the conference championship game, and $63,000 per player for the Super Bowl. (Super Bowl losers are each paid $34,500.)”
This money is essentially salary paid by the league for the weeks of the playoff games, and not really a bonus, as the basic player salary is predicated on a 16 game season. As suggested above, these amounts (which don’t appear to have changed very rapidly over the years) are now insignificant for most players today (in the past, making the playoffs could be a real incentive, in the days when the playoff money might be on the order of 10% or more of the player’s base salary for the season; of course, this is back in the days when many players took offseason jobs selling cars and the like to stretch their $40,000 base salaries). Also, these sums obviously pale in comparison to the bonus/incentives that almost any player will have individually negotiated in his contract, including not only personal performance bonuses, but likely team record/playoff-keyed bonus opportunities as well.