Ok, this is to be expected, the average salary has been increasing through time. Cool to see that the average salary did not rise from about 1926 to about 1940 and then dropped around World War 2 as this corresponds to expectations.

Let's plot this next to the Consumer Price Index to see it in some context. Since the CPI did not start officially being tracked until 1913, I obtained some CPI data from here. This is data used by Robert Sciller in Irrational Exuberance. It happens to start exactly in 1871 which is the first year of MLB. I'll read this in and then do the necessary steps to get it plotted next to the Average Salary.