Don’t get me wrong. I’m not out to the soak the rich baseball players.

But this was a mind-blowing revelation. While I was watching a recent playoff game between the Yankees and the Angels, I got to thinking about how the so-called “post season” has now extended deep into the regular season of the NFL. Some day they’ll be playing the October Classic in December, I thought.

Then I wondered how much the players get in World Series these days. As a kid back in the 60s, I remember how the perennial champs, the Bronx Bombers, always counted on, and in fact, expected to receive the extra money gained from their series shares. Going online, I found this very revealing chart.

It shows the winners’ and losers’ shares from the first year the World Series was played in 1903. The winners got $1,182 for a full share. Somehow the losers got a few bucks more—$1,316. Maybe somebody can explain that anomoly to me, but it was the only year in baseball history that it was better to lose than win.

Looking at the chart, you can see that for nearly a half-century, the shares rose in only small increments. Year after year, the take was $2,000 or so, slowly building to the five- and six-grand range. (A low point for the losing side was $439.50, but in 1908 that was still pretty good bread.)

It was unitl 1954 when the New York Giants faced the Cleveland Indians that the winners’ share topped $10,000—but only be $1,147. From that time until 1968, the winners’ share exceeded $10,000 only five times.

In 1988, when free agency was pulling in higher and higher regular season salaries, the winners share finally went over the 100-grand mark.

Then came the sterioid era of the 90s. World Series shares have more than tripled since then. During the Yankees heyday of the late 90s, any player (even a bullpen coach, potentially) earned well over $1.5 million just in World Series shares alone.

Last year, the winners’ sharted was $351,504.48 and the losers got $233,730.05.

This is handsome bonus money indeed. So I pose the question: if the government can impose salary and bonus restrictions on investment bankers that took taxpayer bailout money, why can’t the same be done with baseball? It seems to me that with taxpayer-subsidized stadiums, they got bailed out too, thanks to the hard-earned money of regualr wage earners.