Editor's note: This feature was launched last Friday at 5:30pm, just 23 hours before the trading deadline which may be the single worst time to launch a feature on a baseball site, but I wanted it out there during the weekend. So I'm reposting this for those of you who may have missed it. We've updated the contracts and team listings through the end of Sunday.
Please leave comments on the original launch post.

This post is the tenth in our series of ten new features for our tenth anniversary.

Around the trading deadline, player contract info becomes a highly valued commodity, so we are very delighted to announce the addition of new financial information to the site.

Player Contracts -- Working with Paul Riker of Fan-Exchange.com, we have added contract information for nearly every active player in the major leagues. Roy Oswalt, Adrian Gonzalez and J.A. Happ, for example, now have information at the top of the page below their bio information like 2011 contract status, service time (through end of 2009), contract summaries with options included, earliest FA and Arb-eligibility, and their agents.

This data also appears stretched out on the Player Salaries section at the bottom of each player's front page. So you can now see just how much Ryan Howard has coming to him in 2015.

On the Team Payroll and Roster Pages (NYY, PHI, ARI) we show the current contract status of most of the players with the team, especially those signed to long-term deals. At the bottom of these tables, we have tried out best to summarize the team's financial situation in future years, and using our "SHARE" tool (which appears above every table on the site--just click it to start) you can generate tables like this to add to your blog, newsgroup, forum, etc.

This data is extremely hard to structure, compile, and build into db form, so we don't yet have performance incentives and other items in the db, but will be working on doing so. Sources for this include Paul Riker, MLB's Joint Exhibit One, media sources, and Cot's Contracts. If you are looking for detailed player contact history, you really need to check out Cot's Contracts. We are going to keep this as up to date as possible just as we have done with the transaction data this summer. All of this data is unofficial, so please help us keep it up to date if you notice errors.

Agent Data -- We attempt to show current representation along with past agents whenever possible. Sources for this include Will Young, media sources, Cot's Contracts, and the agents themselves. Please send along any corrections you find.

Historical Salary Data -- As part of our agreement with SABR, we now have access to historical salary data previous to 1985. This adds 6,268 salaries to our mostly complete salaries from 1985 on. For example, we now have Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams salaries for most of their careers. This data also appears on the team roster pages whenever we have data for at least one player on the team. This data was gathered primarily by the late Doug Pappas whose work is still tremendous fruit for people interested in baseball's finances.

As always feedback and corrections are appreciated.

This wraps up our 10 for 10 anniversary celebration, but don't worry, I'm not taking the rest of the year off. Lots of additional improvements are on the way as well. Thank you for your support of Baseball-Reference.com.

Please leave comments on the original launch post.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 7:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.