Batter's Box Interactive Magazine - Payroll Spread

So how to dig into this? There are a few ways - opening day payrolls by team are available at The Baseball Cube with data going back to 1988. For 2026 I used Spotrac. Top salaries going back to 1985. Lets see what that tells us. I mixed it with data from a few other sources to expand back to 1977 when the Jays first existed. Minimum Salary: baseball-almanac.com and Top Salary: sabr.org Took a bit of hunting to find stuff, but it is mostly out there. The SABR site went back to 1874 ($2,800 for Fergy Malone).