If you’re a sports fan, the biggest news today is that Bryce Harper just signed a 13-year, $330 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies. That’s an absolutely unfathomable amount of money to us regular nobodies, but Harper has certainly been preparing for this. Best of all – or worst of all, depending on who you ask – there are no opt-outs in this deal. Harper is getting paaaaaaid. I assume he’ll put it all in a nice little CD that earns him 2% interest a year.
And once you factor in Harper’s career earnings to this point, which is, according to Baseball Reference, about $48 million, Harper will have made at least $378 million in salary when it’s all said and done. Just taking that into account, Harper now has a higher GDP than the following countries:
- Federated States of Micronesia: $336,184,000
- Palau: $292,185,000
- Marshall Islands: $199,186,000
- Kiribati: $196,187,000
- Nauru: $114,188,000
- Tuvalu: $40,000,000
Now, none of this takes into account the endorsement money Bryce Harper has pulled in. As one of the most marketable players in baseball, Harper has had no shortage of endorsement deals flowing in. In fact, in 2016, he signed the largest endorsement deal in professional baseball history, inking a ten-year extension with Under Armour for an undisclosed amount. So who knows, maybe Bryce Harper is already a billionaire, and he’ll just buy some islands somewhere, establish his own country, qualify for a few dozen Olympic events, and become the supervillain people so clearly want him to be.
