I just read A-Rod is negotiating for a new contract estimated at 275 million for 10 years.
At first I thought OK what is that an hour?
275,000,000 / 10 years = 27,000,000 a year
27,000,000 / 162 games = 169,753.09 a game
I’d say the average game lasts 3 hours
169,753.09/3=56,584.36 an hour
But then I got to thinking, well A-Rod probably is required to do a lot of things not related to baseball, like give interviews and go to training and do charity and TV interviews so there is more likely a lot more required hours.
I’m not a huge fan of this, but just what would be a good idea of how to calculate this. I realize this may be more of an IMHO question but I thought I’d ask it here, so feel free to move it.
Just what is a good idea of how many hour an average baseball player works and a “star” player like A-Rod works. I know those two must be different.
There is no meaningful definition of work that you can use for this other than to exclude sleep and time hidden for the public and also not doing anything baseball related. I can’t stand the guy but his mind lives and breathes baseball and everything about him depends on it. When he is in public, he is an aggressively sought after PR person for baseball and that is work in that it impacts a major business.
It is like asking how many hours Britney Spears works. There are the performances and practices but she is actually working even when doing drugs in an LA nightclub. It produces tangible monetary results for herself and the media.
A person in that type of position can’t really segregate work and “other” the same way that a clock puncher can.
I have seen breakdowns about how much an NFL quarterback “works” based upon the seconds that they have the ball during an actual. That is even more stupid and the same type of analysis would boost up the pay of almost anyone to ridiculous levels. I would guess that the actual fireman makes well over $100 an when we count the time just actively fighting fires. If you just count the time a given firefighter is directly saving a structure from collapse and saving lives, their pay per hour is probably well into the thousands.
Well, i think that trying to work out an hourly rate for a contract like this is a sort of pointless exercise. Hell, even if you count every single hour A-Rod is alive each year—awake and asleep—he still makes over $3,000 an hour on that contract.
But i did want to point out something:
You realize, i assume, that when guys like A-Rod “go to training,” what they do at training is, in fact “related to baseball”? Sure, most of these guys have incredible talent, but to succeed consistently at the major league level constant practice is essential. Even someone with a reputation as a slacker, like Manny Ramirez, still puts in long hours in the batting cages attempting to maintain and improve the quality of his swing.
If you want an interesting study of the sort of things that baseball players do (when they’re not actually playing a game) in order to stay at the top of their game, i highly recommend George Will’s book Men at Work.
Maybe the question can be phrased more concretely like this: How much time does the team spend in practice, and how much of that is the minimum that he is contractually obligated to show up for?
I wonder too if his contract explicitly spells out how much he is contractually obligated to do.
For instance, you could say that while under contract the team “owns” you. They pay you all year even if you’re not actively playing baseball or training for baseball every year.
I would think that a contract might need to spell out how much “owning” or “work” you have to do for the team. Does it say “Over the course of one year, the player will be expected to spend no more than 100 hours in team-related activities outside of playing and training”? Something like that.
I don’t know if the contract spells this out, but a player reports to a coach, and has to do what they say. They can be punished in various ways if they don’t.
There was a recent fuss about a football player who was fined by his team for going to a family funeral on the game day.
And I know of Vikings football players who have been reprimanded & fined for missing or just being late to practice sessions.
Alex Rodriguez’s working conditions are set out by the Collective Bargaining Agreement that his union (MLBPA) and MLB have set out. But the players are salaried, so it’s not like they are punching a clock.
Every player is expected to show up for a game at a certain time and be prepared to practice. Players are expected to keep themselves in good shape all year.
A baseball season starts in early March with spring training and can run into November if your team makes it to the World Series. There is an enormous amount of travel and scrutiny.
I think some are also failing to measure how much the presence of Rodriguez on the Yankees roster helps to add to the Yankees bottom line. Rodriguez makes the team better. When the team is better, the team makes more money.
Or to put in the converse, what actions or inactions on A-Rod’s part would invalidate the contract? If, say, he cuts or bails on every BP session, does he get fined, suspended or what?
This doesn’t happen a whole lot, but a few years back Aaron Boone got his contract invalidated when he incurred an injury playing basketball over the winter that kept him out for pretty much an entire season. His contract specifically forbade him from engaging in “injury risk” activities, even recreational ones, such as skiing, bungee jumping/rock climbing and yes, basketball. The union couldn’t say put up much of a complaint since it was spelled out in black and white, and Boone admitted to the injury (a ruptured Achilles tendon or something) as happening during a basketball game.
Alex Rodriguez’s contract contains clauses, which are standard in most player contracts, stating that that it can be invalidated for a lot of reasons. The easy ones to nail a player on are crimes (if Michael Vick played baseball, he would also not have a contract anymore), but there are particular activities players aren’t supposed to do for fear of injury (skiing, parachuting, stuff like that).
In practice, teams don’t invalidate a player’s contract for an injury doing a forbidden activity because it only serves to tick off the player if he wants to come back. The Yankees did so with Aaron Boone, in part because they had Alex Rodriguez to replace him. The Houston Astros could have invalidated Jeff Kent’s contract after he broke his wrist “washing his car” (which was really a motorcycle accident) because Kent wouldn’t miss the whole season and they didn’t have an adequate replacement.
A lot of the off-field activities are not covered by the contracts. As previous posters have mentioned, there are clauses about not doing things that could get a player hurt, but things like product endorsements, personal or TV appearances, and so on are usually not included in the contract, as long as they don’t interfere with the player’s official playing or training schedule. So they’re free to make even more money.
Most of the contracts don’t cover the off-season, except again with regard to dangerous activities. So players that are not making millions need to find a second job. This is especially true for minor leaguers. Most modern players also spend a huge amount of time during the off-season working out. I knew a minor league player who was spending 3-4 hours a day at the gym or at a batting cage during the off-season, and that’s not part of the contract, at least in the minors. It’s just expected that a player who wants to succeed will put in the time and effort.
Let’s not forget the other side of the contract: the money A-Rod gets paid is considerably less than the published “value” of the contract . There are various inducements, incentives, etc. that he may never see, there are insurance and possibly pension provisions that involve no payments to him during the life of the contract, so his actual salary (or “hourly pay”) is much smaller than you’d calculate this way.
I never actually thought about that. But what WOULD happen if the scheduled game for the best quarterback of the entire sport coincided with something critically important for him. Like his child’s funeral or something?
Besides, most parents have a good bit of say as to when funerals are scheduled. Presumably he could arrange to have it on a day other than the game day.
Nobody’s mentioned travel, and that accounts for maybe 20 hours a week if you include the bus trips from hotel to stadium. Players practice every day before games, and they engage in weight lifting and such as part of their workout regimens. Unless they’re injured, that’s a year-round activity, and they usually do it on “off days” when there is no game scheduled.
And as others have said, when you take into account the media obligations, endorsements, and other public appearances, a guy like A-Rod is working way more than 8-hours a day during the season.
I hear people argue all the time that athletes are overpaid, but those guys work incredibly hard, they’re incredibly skilled, and frankly, they generate more revenue than they earn. Can you say the same thing about CEOs who earn similar salaries?
When business forces me on the road I consider the entire length of the trip to be work time regardless of how many hours I actually work since the entire time is work requiring me to be away from home, family, and whatever I might have done otherwise.
So, including that idea:
A baseball season is 162 games spread over 182 days.
Post game shower, cool down, exercise, interviews, etc. about an hour (probably varies a lot from player to player) = 81 hours
So during the season that would be a rough estimate of time directly taken out of your life by playing or preparing to play baseball at 2,812 hours.
Add to that about 6 weeks of Spring Training which is essentially one mega business trip unless you happen to live in the area and that would be another 1,000 hours or so for a 3,812 hour total. A hypothetical 9-5 office worker with no business travel would work about 2,000 hours.
Then there’ll be the charity work expected of a good roll model athlete, team promotional events (filming a Yankees commertial or posing for the billboard is “work” too), etc. But those would vary dramatically from player to player though I imagine A-Rod is at the high side of the bell curve on most all of them.