"The average salary now for … a professional baseball player is $2.7 million. And there are a lot of contracts that have been let out in the $100 million-$150 million range," says Dr. Walden, a professor of agricultural and resource economics. "I think what’s going on here is simply that there’s more money now available in baseball.

"Believe it or not, baseball revenues are way up. … Attendance is up, there are big media contracts, merchandise is very healthy and a lot of teams have new stadiums that are generating revenue," he explains. "So with free agency –- and free agency means that within limits baseball players are able to move around between teams -- ... players are in play and teams can go after them. And if they have a lot of money that’ll end up in terms of bigger salaries.

"Now a team always has to judge whether paying a player a certain amount of money -- say $100 million for five years or so -- will they get that back in terms of performance for the team [and] in terms of where the team is going to go in the standings. So teams will not just throw money at players," he concludes. "They will want to try to evaluate whether they will get that back in terms of the revenue base."