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The recession has finally hit baseball. Collectively, the Major League Baseball clubs lowered salaries by a total of $47 million this year, or about 1.7 percent. Poor things. The 30 major league ball clubs pay a collective $2.65 billion in payroll, which represents more than 20 percent of Maine’s yearly budget. The MLB payroll could single-handedly fund MaineCare.
Now I know baseball players have a very particular skill set – one that I certainly don’t have. I also know their salaries are what the market will bear, that because millions across the country attend ballparks and watch ball games on TV the ball clubs can afford to pay Derek Jeter $21 million. But I know Derek Jeter can’t do what I do, and what I do isn’t even that hard. Imagine if we asked Jeter to become a doctor.
Maybe we need to make surgery a spectator sport. Imagine the nation’s top neurosurgeon performing a lobotomy in Yankee Stadium before 57,000 screaming fans. The neurosurgeon deserves that $21 million more; nobody can deny that. Doctors have to attend school for eight years, plus a year-long internship and several years as a resident (it depends on what field you want to go into). Not only that, but the competition for recognition in the medical field is just as, if not more, intense than competition recognition in baseball. And there’s always the small matter of someone’s life being in a doctor’s hands.
Remember what I said earlier about the salaries being what the market can bear? It’s not even true. Sports are so encrusted in advertising and sponsorship that it’s less about how much one’s willing to pay to get into a ballpark than it is about how much one’s willing to suffer Bud Light commercials and product placement. Come to think of it, salaries paid by clubs don’t even begin to consider the massive amounts of money paid to players by sponsors.
If companies want to splash David Ortiz on the labels of Gatorade or Cheetos, that’s their prerogative, but it’s ridiculous for the Yankees to charge $300 a ticket, especially when the country’s in an economic downturn. How can it be our national sport when blue-collar workers, who make up the majority of this country’s workforce, can’t afford to attend a game? Is it supposed to make them feel better to know the players they can’t afford to watch are making eight digits a year?
I appreciate a top sportsman as much as anyone else, but it’s time we started appreciating other members of our society. If only the people who keep me alive on the operating table or the people who teach me or even the people who keep my office clean could be appreciated as much as the people who provide entertainment for me once or twice a week.
Bangor Daily News