Matt Smith

The Brewers won the World Series last night. And nobody on the field earned a dollar from the final game of the World Series. Here’s why. MLB players don’t get paid salary in the postseason. Instead, every playoff team gets a cut of a bonus pool funded by ticket sales. Players split their team’s cut among themselves. Those are playoff shares. Milwaukee’s cut will be the biggest. But today they’re thinking about ring sizes. The other 11 clubhouses are thinking about the check. How the pool works: • Only the minimum games count: the first 2 of the Wild Card, 3 of the Division Series, 4 of the LCS and World Series • Players get 60% of the ticket money from those games • Milwaukee clinched in Game 5, so that game paid $0 To put it in perspective: • Last year’s pool: $128.2 million • The champion takes 36%, which was $46.1 million for the Dodgers Who gets paid: • With the club since June 1? Full share, automatically • Everyone else gets voted on by the players • That vote matters: the 2022 Astros gave out 59 full shares and set the record at $516,347. The 2025 Dodgers gave out 82 What a full share paid last year: • Won the World Series (Dodgers): $484,748 • Lost the World Series (Blue Jays): $354,118 • Lost the NLCS (Brewers): $168,853 • Lost the Wild Card (Red Sox): $9,347 A nearly 52x gap. For context, a player on major league minimum last year, which was $760,000, it was 63.8% of his salary. These are the conversation we’re having with our big league clients right now. Especially as we head into what looks like a lockout, these playoff shares hold real value