Justin Verlander’s New Tigers Contract Boosts His All-Time MLB Earnings Ranking
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The Detroit Tigers and Justin Verlander reunited earlier this week. For Verlander, it’s a perfect landing spot after nearly a decade away. For the Tigers, it gives them another veteran starter for a rotation that is increasingly looking like one of the best in baseball.
The Tigers got Verlander for a song when set against his career accomplishments — 266 wins, a 3.32 ERA, two World Series rings and three Cy Young awards. He’s as accomplished a starting pitcher as there is in the game right now. His professed goal is to reach 300 wins. He may be hard pressed.
The Tigers are rolling the dice only a bit on Verlander, now 42 years old and certainly not the Cy Young winner he was as recently as 2022. He finished 4-11 with a 3.85 ERA with San Francisco last year. But he did throw 152 innings and struck out 137 to move up to No. 8 all-time in career strikeouts, passing Giants legend Gaylord Perry.
Justin Verlander’s All-Time Earnings
Per Spotrac, Verlander’s one-year, $13 million deal with the Tigers only has a $2 million base salary and it comes with $11 million in deferred money, which he won’t get until 2030. It’s not like he’ll need it for the savings account, but it’s a nice deferment that boosts his all-time career earnings in baseball to $422 million, per Spotrac.
He was already in the No. 2 position ahead of his former Tigers teammate, Miguel Cabrera, who made $393 million. Another former Tigers teammate, pitcher Max Scherzer, is fourth on the list at $360 million. He has yet to sign with a team and is reportedly waiting for a team on his preferred list to come calling.
Rounding out the Top 5 is Albert Pujols, who made $341 million.
Verlander is unlikely to catch the leader on the list, Alex Rodriguez, who made $485 million during his career.
Verlander’s career also started with an unusual contract. As a first-round pick, he received the normal signing bonus. But when he broke into the Majors in 2005, the Tigers signed him to a five-year, $4.45 million deal to help control his cost through is pre-arbitration and arbitration years.
He then landed a one-year, $3.675 million deal in his final arbitration season in 2009 before he signed a five-year, $80 million deal in free agency in 2010. The Tigers extended him in a deal that was for seven years and $180 million. The Houston Astros inherited that extension when they acquired him in trade in 2017.
In 2020, the Astros extended him for two years at $66 million. Houston re-signed him again before the 2022 season for $25 million.
He left for the New York Mets in free agency on a two-year, $86.6 million deal the Astros inherited when he was re-acquired via trade. San Francisco signed him to a one-year deal worth $15 million last season.
Yes, baseball has been very good to Verlander on a number of levels.
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Matthew Postins is an award-winning sports journalist who covers Major League Baseball for OnSI. He also covers the Big 12 Conference for Heartland College Sports.
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