As long as Derek Jeter keeps smiling and stays out of trouble, he’ll remain baseball’s $200 million man.
The Yankee slugger, who turned 36 last month, was named yesterday by a sport business trade paper as Major League Baseball’s most marketable player by a wide margin.
The St. Louis Cardinals All-Star Albert Pujols was a distant second. The Mets’ David Wright finished eighth in the survey of sports business professionals. Alex Rodriguez came in ninth.
Jeter already is MLB’s endorsement champ with whopping deals like Nike’s $100 million, 10-year contract to plug Nike’s Air Jordan Jumpman sneaker on TV and elsewhere. The deal runs through 2015. The structure of the deal could not be learned.
It’s just one of 15 similar deals Jeter currently holds that pay him about $8.5 million a year. His sponsors include Gatorade, Gillette, Ford, Skippy, Delta, Fleet Bank, XM Satellite Radio, Avon and VISA.
The Yankee captain’s contract with the Pinstripers will pay him $189 million over 10 years and ends this year.
He’s earned more than $200 million from baseball thus far in his career, an amount that could jump sharply after his new Yankees contract is inked, along with an expected uptick in sports endorsements in 2011.
“When a company wants to be included in national baseball, the first person they look at is Derek Jeter,” said Brian Helfrich, assistant managing editor of SportsBusiness Daily. “He’s the best face of the best brand in baseball.”
“A company knows what they get with Jeter,” Helfrich said. “He’s a nice guy, he’s always smiling with a beautiful celebrity on his arm. And he’s also stayed out of trouble.”
Forbes last week ranked Jeter as the nation’s No. 64 richest star in its Celebrity 100 list, with an annual income of $30 million.
SportsBusiness Daily said it’s the third time in seven years Jeter has won its highest marketing honor in its annual survey of top marketing and sports executives. This time, he received 80 percent of the first-place votes in numerous balloting rounds.