Jeez, Jodi, when did you trade in the GOP for Karl Marx?
Here’s the deal. You’ve got a small group of supremely talented athletes whose labor creates billions of dollars in revenue for their employers every year. But the workers’ talents are not fungible, so if those guys don’t play the game, all the revenue goes bye-bye. That makes their services extremely valuable to the employers, so in a free market, those workers are going to be compensated at very, very high rates. Do they need to be paid that much money? Who cares? Fact is, their services have extraordinary market value, and it’s perfectly fair that they get compensated in accordance with that market value.
Oh, and re: the minimum salary? It’s somewhere right around $220,000 right now, and they’ve agreed to raise it to $300K next year. That’s pretty serious money, no question. But to get to the majors at all, baseball players have to work through the minors for years–about three to five years, on average, even for those drafted out of college–for ridiculously small salaries and odds greatly stacked against them ever making it to the big show.
If a high school or college player is lucky enough to be drafted in the first dozen or so picks, he will probably end up with a signing bonus large enough to make you set for life, but those signing bonuses drop off very quickly. After the second or third round, you’ll be lucky to have enough to buy a new car. Most minor leaguers work low-paying jobs in the offseason just to make ends meet, unless they’re lucky enough to get sent to one of the winter leagues to continue their development.
Also, how many young players have their baseball careers ended by injuries? I’d guess somewhere around one third, maybe more. So those players have basically wasted years of their lives on a long-shot dream, made essentially no money, and missed the chance to get or complete a college education.
And what of those players who finally get a shot at the big leagues. How many of them stick for more than a couple of seasons? Maybe half? Try living the rest of your life on a couple years worth of salaries in the low six-figure range. And it’s probably only 25% of players who ever make it to free agency, where the real money is, and even most of those players are never going to see more than a couple years of seven-figure salaries. Pretty good dough, but not enough that you’re set for life.
Major league players–especially those who are lucky enough to acquire the necessary service time for free agency and skilled enough to continue playing the game–have basically won the lottery. And you complain that they’re paid more than they “need”? Please. Save the socialism for laborers who could actually benefit from it. The only people who will benefit from it in this case are the owners, and they “need” the money even less than the players do.
Now, having said all that, I think this collective bargaining/lockout/strike stuff is a bunch of unadulterated horseshit. The more I think about this, the more I think the answer is simple: let the owners work out the revenue sharing (preferably the 50-50 team/league split I described above), then let the players and owners freely negotiate salaries just as everybody else does. Tah-dah! Suddenly, you’ve got a free market system where it makes sense (labor), plus a cooperative economic model where it’s required by the nature of the business (revenue sharing). Man, I dig economic efficiency.
Too bad it’s only a pipe dream, since both sides are once again trying to gain the biggest advantage for themselves and screw the other side. What a train wreck. Fortunately, I’m pretty sure both sides know a strike would be disastrous. I would be very surprised if one occurres, though it will (as always) come right down to the wire. Nature of the beast, unfortunately.
