Some information on the data collected and analyzed for this project:

• This dataset includes MLB contracts containing incentives with the first year of the contract starting in the 2025 or 2026 seasons.

  • The temporal limitation in data collection was imposed to focus on the current state of the market for incentives, and due to time constraints regarding historical data collection. The data will be updated on an ongoing basis. Reference is made to historical incentive structures where relevant for historical context or opinion pieces.

• The dataset comprises roughly 200 contracts.

• For the purposes of this project:

  • “Award incentive” refers to incentives that give a player additional potential earnings based on contingencies related to league awards, such as MVP and Cy Young.

  • “Performance incentive” refers to incentives that give a player additional potential earnings based on contingencies related to payer usage, including plate appearances, innings pitched, and at-bats.

• Data reliability regarding incentive structures in MLB contracts is inherently limited, as it is almost entirely based on third-party reporting of contract structures. The data for this project has been collected from a range of sources, but primarily Spotrac, Cot’s Baseball Contracts and FanGraphs. Given the limitations in the source data, there may be contracts containing incentives that are not included in the data set and there may be situations where the reported incentive structure is different than the actual structure agreed to by the player and team.

• Most of the information regarding the history of incentives was collected from historical newspaper records.

• This project does not focus on signing bonuses, deferred payments, or the pre-arbitration bonus pool.