Best Ballplayer for the Buck - Forbes.com Special Report.

Sports & Finance Editors/Baseball Writers & Columnists

NEW YORK--(BW SportsWire)--March 29, 2001

Who is the best value in baseball? Not Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa.

According to Forbes.com Staff Editor Dan Ackman, these sluggers have great stats, but they also command huge salaries: Sosa pulled down $11 million last season; Big Mac topped $9 million.

To find out which players are earning their keep, Forbes.com developed a proprietary formula evaluating performance and comparing performance to salaries. See how almost 300 of your favorite players stack up:

www.forbes.com/baseball

Here are some highlights:

-- Among the game's economic elite - players who earned $6 million and up -
Toronto Blue Jays first baseman Carlos Delgado produced the most relative to
his compensation. In terms of value, Delgado, who earned $6.6 million last
season, was in a league of his own.

-- Not only did Todd Helton, the Colorado Rockies first baseman, flirt with
.400, he was also the game's most productive hitter overall, and with a 2000
salary of just $1.3 million, he was the best value in all baseball.

-- New York Yankee Bernie Williams was one of the most overpaid superstars. He
earned more than $12 million last season and had just slightly better than
average numbers.

Forbes.com will publish its rankings of almost 300 MLB players today at 7:00 p.m. (ET) in conjunction with an in-depth database comparing the business performance of all 30 major league teams. In addition our editors have selected a Best Value Team and a Worst Value Team - essentially the best and worst teams, based on our value scale, that one could assemble with a given budget.