MLB Salary Inequality

With the start of MLB Spring Training underway, I wanted to turn my attention to analyzing baseball over the next few blogs.  For the first, I decided to look at MLB player salary inequality as measure by the Gini coefficient.  So I downloaded Sean Lahman's MLB database and after unzipping the files I used his Salary spreadsheet to calculate the Gini Coefficient for the data that he has from 1985 to 2013.  Here are the results since the 1985 season along with the number of players per season.

Season	Gini	n
1985	0.3843	550
1986	0.4888	738
1987	0.5104	627
1988	0.5073	663
1989	0.5328	711
1990	0.5332	867
1991	0.5432	685
1992	0.5728	769
1993	0.6257	923
1994	0.6221	884
1995	0.6787	986
1996	0.6623	931
1997	0.6402	925
1998	0.6353	998
1999	0.6290	1006
2000	0.6066	836
2001	0.6092	860
2002	0.6123	846
2003	0.6251	827
2004	0.6335	831
2005	0.6241	831
2006	0.6189	819
2007	0.6099	842
2008	0.6240	856
2009	0.6185	813
2010	0.6225	830
2011	0.6215	839
2012	0.6196	848
2013	0.6168	815

As you can see since the early to mid-90's MLB player salary inequality has remained fairly stable and fairly unequal - similar to South Africa in 2009, but less equal than the US income distribution, which was 0.477 in 2011.