Can I exercise my OP’s prerogative (yeah, right) and say that for the purposes of this thread, a “sport” is something where physical talent is at least a substantial part of winning. Chess and poker etc while perfectly valid activities, don’t qualify.
[QUOTE=mhendo]
Be careful of mistaking the Average for the Median.
The latest figures i have in my computer for baseball salaries are for 2006. The average (for 821 listed players), is $2,828,623, but the median (i.e., the half-way point) is $950,000.
So, in 2006 there were 410 guys making $950,000 or more, but there were actually only 257 guys making more than $2.82 million, because the huge salaries of guys like A-Rod, Jeter, Bond, etc. skew the average upwards.
That’s still far more than in golf, but not quite as many as you suggested.
[/QUOTE]
Thanks for the correction. I knew that would come up, but I mistakenly assumed that the median would be close to the mean, or higher, with so many big market teams overpaying injured players and bullpen specialists. Guess I should have glanced at the Royals and Marlins payrolls after looking at the Cubs, Soxes and Yanks.
[QUOTE=Yeticus Rex]
Is there any baseball player pulling down $1M+ per day? Uh, no.
[/QUOTE]
In 2006 Kerry Wood earned $3 million per day.
[sub]Bitter? Me? No![/sub]
What’s left of a pitcher’s arm after a long career? If you’re a power hitter you just knock dingers out of the park and jog around the bases and stand around in the outfield. But I’d be worried about blowing out my arm as a star pitcher and spending my retirement years in constant pain. Pain==bad. How bad off is a typical retired pitcher?
[QUOTE=The Cocky Watchman]
Downside to jockeying is that its a wee man’s game. If you’re at all approaching medium-sized then you’ll need to be on a diet for all of your professional life - no fun. So you’ve got the money, you’ve got the massive longevity, you’ve even got the thrill of de-frauding honest God-fearing punters by being a crooked cheating bastid; but at the end of the day who wants to be a short man?
[/QUOTE]
There was an article in either SI or ESPN Magazine about the life of a local racetrack jockey, and it was not a pleasant read…lots of crash dieting and painkillers (being thrown off a horse sucks even if you’re not trampled by the horse) for tiny little purses that aren’t guaranteed. Not everyone can be Willie Shoemaker.
It has to be golf. Every golfer who qualifies for the PGA tour is a millionaire, most before the first tournament even starts. They get to sell advertising all over themselves, plus the demographic that watches golf on TV is an advertisers dream. The top players like Tiger and Mickleson and Nicklaus, Palmer, and Norman are so rich they could hire A-Rod to wash their cars. Add in the career length of a golfer, the following the good weather all year, the conditions of the playing field, plus someone else carries your luggage all day and tells the hecklers to shut up.
The only drawback is that there is no off-season to get away from the game - golf skills go away really quickly, so you have to keep practicing even if you’re not playing tournaments.
And the guy who said there are no groupies in golf has NO idea.
After reading the OP’s question - before even loading the thread - I thought, “Manny Ramirez.” So here’s vote #4 for baseball secondary to one of the game’s most prolific hitters getting away with whatever goof-off the day holds. After all, it’s just Manny being Manny.