MLB Players, With Kansas City Royals, Enjoy Record 2015 Postseason Payout Of $69 Million

It's a good time to be a professional baseball player (MLB). Not that there was ever a bad time, but monetarily speaking, 2015 was pretty great. Aside from the league wide minimum starting salary of $507K in 2015, players who participated in the postseason are set to rake in record numbers--specifically, a shared and distributed pot of $69.8 million dollars.

According to Yahoo! Sports, the biggest winners were the Kansas City Royals, the winners of this year's World Series, who enjoyed a cool slice of $25.1 million (or $370K per playoff share). The Mets, the World Series finalists, came in as the second best compensated team in the league at $16.7 million (or 300K per playoff share).

Yahoo! Sports provided this breakdown of how the money distribution works:

Players get a pool of 50 percent of the gate receipts from the wild-card games, 60 percent from the first three games of the ALDS and NLDS, then 60 percent from the first four games of the ALCS, NLCS and World Series. That totaled $69.8 million this season, surpassing the previous high of $65.3 million in 2012. That money is then divided amongst the 10 teams that made the postseason.

Players on those teams then vote on how the shares are distributed. For instance, a full time player gets a full share, whereas a rookie who played a minor roll may only get a partial share. It all really depends on how the veterans of the ball club want to play it; or what side of the bed they woke up on. From there, some teams give checks to trainers, coaches, grounds crew members, perhaps a couple of vendors, and any other person affiliated with the team, according to Yahoo! Sports.

These are historically good figures, too. The Mets total of $300K was a record sum for a runner up, while the Royals sum of $370K was good enough for the second best purse of all time, only behind that of last years winners San Francisco Giants, who earned 380K.

Not a bad little end of the year bonus.