Giants players get a record $388K postseason paycheck

Mike Oz
(AP)
(AP)

The San Francisco Giants are getting one heck of a bonus after winning their third World Series in five years. They're receiving postseason paychecks of $388,605.94, a record for MLB's "playoff share" system that doles out extra money to teams that made the postseason.

MLB announced Monday how it would distribute the extra $62 million in player money made during the postseason.

Each team that makes the postseason gets a cut — playoff shares, they're called — depending on how well they fared. The Giants get the most, the Kansas City Royals get the next highest amount and so on.

Teams then distribute the money accordingly to their players. Most players get a "full share," which came out to $388,000 this year for the Giants. Other players get partial shares or cash awards depending on how much they played. Players on each team vote who gets what.

The Giants, for instance, issued 47 full shares, 9.65 partial shares and 17 cash awards. Their $388,000-per-share total tops the previous record of $377,000 set by the 2012 Giants. The 2013 Boston Red Sox earned a playoff share of $307,000.

This, from MLB, is how the $62 million players' pool is determined:

The players’ pool was formed from 50 percent of the gate receipts from the Wild Card Games presented by Budweiser; 60 percent of the gate receipts from the first three games of the Division Series; 60 percent of the gate receipts from the first four games of the League Championship Series; and 60 percent of the gate receipts from the first four games of the World Series.

Here's a team-by-team breakdown of what a full playoff share paid in 2014:

• San Francisco Giants: $388,605.94
• Kansas City Royals: $230,699.73
• Baltimore Orioles: $125,288.04
• St. Louis Cardinals: $115,480.62
• Detroit Tigers: $31,543.93
• Los Angeles Dodgers: $31,542.85
• Los Angeles Angels: $29,844.65
• Washington Nationals: $29,418.13
• Pittsburgh Pirates: $16,555.58
• Oakland Athletics: $15,266.43

One note: The teams who lose their playoff series get the same amount to distribute— for example, the Orioles and Cardinals both earned a players' pool of $7,443,175.42 after losing the ALCS and NLCS, respectively. The difference comes in how players chose to divide it up between full shares and partial shares.

This season, the Nats awarded the most full shares (58) while the Pirates and Giants issued the fewest (47), thus raising their individual payouts.

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Mike Oz is an editor for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!