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| | Monday, December 11 Baseball laments as salaries skyrocket | |||||
Special to ESPN.com | ||||||
| Sandy Alderson didn't take Mike Hampton's signing particularly well,
but that's Alderson. A bit of a moralist, a bit of a schoolmarm, a lot of a
loyal employee to the owners who crawled over each other to sign Hampton.
So you can imagine the number of small-caliber weapons Alderson, Major League Baseball's executive vice president of baseball operations, will be
hauling out now that Alex Rodriguez is a Texas Ranger.
And not just any Texas Ranger. A Texas Ranger whose yearly salary over
the next decade is $25.2 MILLION AMERICAN DOLLARS. Whose daily game check is
$155,555 over the life of the contract. Whose pay per inning is $17,284. Whose pay per out is slightly more
than $3,000 (despite frantic calls to Bill James, we can't account for Ranger
home wins that would eliminate the bottom of the ninth, or extra innings).
Before taxes and agent's commission, of course.
Now this won't be another tired, old "When Will This Madness End?"
screed. If Tom Hicks didn't have the dough to pay Rod The A, let alone a plan
to make it up in TV, radio and ticket sales, he wouldn't have offered it. And
if he wouldn't have offered it, any one of about 12 other owners would have.
And that's Alderson's real problem, only he's too politically savvy to
admit it. The people who pay Rodriguez, Hampton and their compatriots are the
same people who are paying Alderson, and Alderson didn't reach his lofty
position by saying, "My paycheck is guaranteed by morons."
Thus, to see him fulminate about Hampton's deal with Colorado, which
made him the highest-paid player in baseball for precisely four days, is
always guaranteed to get laughs. It's like watching the old crank on the
corner shaking his fist and snarling, "Why I oughta . . . " at those
disrespectful fourth graders who leave candy wrappers in his rose bushes.
And we laugh because we know that Alderson knows how it looks, too. He
knows that his employers can't be trusted to take a stand on salaries,
because they don't want to. They're selling big while Alderson is publicly
defending the intellectual purity of moderation.
Or at least the intellectual purity of rebutting players who say, "It's
not the money."
Alderson, though, is also nobody's boob. He knows the only way out of
the owners' bind, the one thing Don Fehr can't trump, is one thing he can't
affect on his own.
Contraction. Active, aggressive team folding. Not two teams, or even
four, but six, and maybe even more. Abandoning Florida to its wacky legal
system. Leaving Quebec to fend for itself. Returning Minnesota's summers to
the hunting and fishing lobby. Giving Kansas City a miss. Leaving Oakland to
wither and die.
That's 150 players losing their jobs, and 150 more dropping from
mid-level salaries to the minimum. It's whacking teams that don't have
huge profit margins to defend, or new stadiums on the way.
After all, the only thing keeping Cincinnati or Pittsburgh off the
endangered list are their new parks, and the only thing keeping Milwaukee
alive at all is its park and Bud Selig's personal interest.
This is the draconian method Alderson would like to see in his heart of
hearts, because he is a problem solver by nature, and this is ownership's
only sure-fire solution to the problem they see -- to burn down the
garage.
That tactic, though, is years away, or at least one crippling recession
away. It is the history of sports in America -- when the economy goes south,
so do teams, and in some cases entire leagues. Your ABA, your WHA, your USFL,
your WFL, your NASL, and on and on.
The last time baseball shrank itself was 1900, when the National League
shed itself of Louisville, Baltimore, Cleveland and Washington. A year later,
the American League reared its nasty head.
But it is that precedent upon which the hardliners will rest their case
after the current labor debacle concludes, which is still more than a year
away.
In the meantime, we'll still have Sandy Alderson crooking his finger at
new-made multimillionaires and grousing about those runaway salaries and the
men who make them.
Alex Rodriguez is making about $520 per pitch. Clearly, America's
pre-eminent hall monitor still has work to do.
Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Examiner is a frequent contributor to ESPN.com. | ALSO SEE A-Rod to join Rangers with 10-year, $252 deal Stark: $252 million? Believe it Indians formulate deal for Manny similar to Boston's Neyer: Don't order playoff tickets yet A-Rod-Ometer: How fat is his wallet? AthletesDirect: Alex Rodriguez answers fans' questions | |||||
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