Batter Up - Or Not

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind
of America had better learn baseball” – Jacques Barzun

Major League Baseball launched its 112^th season in America on Wednesday
(although officially it began last week in Japan), but for some fans (of small
market teams mostly) opening day is no longer a day of optimism (hope does not spring eternal). Small market teams have been precluded not only from the chance to win a championship but effectively from postseason play entirely (with few exceptions) by their limited financial resources. They cannot compete with the wealthiest teams in signing the best free agents available in the off-season, or even keeping their own best players.  Every year the salaries paid to these players get more ridiculous and obscene, especially in an economy where millions of people are still unemployed, not because they do not want to work or because they have inadequate qualifications but simply because their former jobs have been eliminated, whether from small businesses or a large employer such as NASA.

Back to the obscene salaries and long-term contracts paid by big market teams. A few of the latest examples should suffice. Albert Pujols: $250 million for 10 years by Los Angeles; Prince Fielder: $214 million for 9 years by Detroit; Jose Reyes $106 million for 6 years by Miami; Jonathan Papelbon:$50 for 4 years by Philadelphia, a team which has two pitchers  and a first baseman with $100 million plus contracts. The New York Yankees bought themselves a 27th world championship in 2009 by signing the best pitcher (C.C.Sabbathia) and the best position player (MarkTeixera)available in the preceding offseason to contracts in excess of $150 million dollars each. Boston’s similar free agent signings of over $150 million each (Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez) did not even get them to the postseason last season last year, however. Philadelphia and New York lost in the first round of the postseason last year, ironically, but they get there every year, at least. When was the last time teams in Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Seattle, Oakland, to name a few, went to the postseason?

Most recently, teams like San Francisco and Cincinatti gave obscene contracts to
pitcher Matt Cain ($126 million for 6 years) and first baseman Joey Votto ($251
million for 12 years) respectively to prevent losing them to free agency. If
you don’t consider the amount of money in all these cases “obscene,” do the
math to determine how much these players are making for each game - one day of “work?” When the average annual salary in baseball is over one million dollars, how can the average American worker feel about his/her job, if lucky enough to have one?

If you don’t care about the inequality in baseball caused by the lack of a “real”
salary cap, you have probably stopped reading already. If you would like to see
baseball change, perhaps the following two actions will help slow down, if not
stop the madness. First, let’s stop buying tickets, whose prices have risen
beyond the reach of many working people and their kids already. Second, let’s
not subscribe to TV channels or package deals which offer extra games for extra
money. TV revenue enables the wealthiest teams to pay exorbitant salaries.

To paraphrase what former President Clinton said about America is also true of its
signature game: There’s nothing wrong with baseball that cannot be fixed by
what is right with baseball.