For Love of the Game

Luxury tax.  Drug testing.  Minimum base salary.  Travel.  Multi-millionaire ball players arguing with multi-millionaire team owners.  These are among the topics posing a threat to America's pastime - baseball.  Major League Baseball is on the brink (an over-used word this week) of its ninth work stoppage of its history.  And, it is deplorable.

The owners, who, in my opinion, are just as much at fault as the players, are complaining over the rise in the salaries of the players.  They are upset that the rising costs of running a ball club, and they are crying the blues when it comes to their financial statements.  Yet, they continuously give in to the players' demands for dollars.  Amazing.

The players, whose average salary is about $2 million per player, are looking for more structure to the travel plans (as opposed to the trip to Toronto then Tampa then Detroit then Texas) and that the new players, the rookies and September call-ups, are better compensated than the approximately $200,000 they make now.

I am a teacher.  I began teaching as a Social Studies teacher in a Catholic high school.  When I signed my first contract, I earned $11,250.  My raise after one year was $500.  The next three years' salaries were as follows: $14,000, $18,000, and $22,000.  I was let go due to budgetary problems.  Had to be my mammoth salary.  When I signed on last year at a public school, I was given a salary of $26,720 (roughly).  This was a lot of money to me as I had more than doubled my salary from six years earlier.  Please understand that when I secure my Master's Degree in a couple of years my salary scale will be a bit higher.

Let's compare what I do to what players do.  I teach seven periods a day, forty minutes each.  I have approximately 25 students per class.  It takes about a half-hour to forty-five minutes to prepare for each eighty minute block I teach, and only because I have done it now for six years.  When I assign homework, I am grading 80+ papers - more if it is an essay or document based question when it could be as much as four pages per student.  So, when all is said and done, I work 10 or more hours per day on my primary job as a teacher.  The other 14 are spent coordinating an evening program at a local business college and teaching a class there for more students.  Seventy-five or more hours per week at the "office" and another 8-12 preparing.  And I made $42,000 last year.

Players work six months, travel in luxurious style, eat at the best restaurants, and sleep in five star hotels all summer.  They are adored by fans.  They play a game where everything is paid for by the team they play for.  They get top doctors when they are sick.  They get top-notch treatment when they are rehabbing injuries.  They are treated like kings playing a sport most would play for free.  And they only "work" about 3 1Z¯2 hours per day.  Owners, who stupidly pay non-pitchers as much as $25 million per year (Alex Rodriguez) and pitchers who play EVERY FIFTH DAY $17 million (Kevin Brown - who also got five round-trip accommodations for his family to see him during the season because he probably could not afford the travel by himself) set prices of food, drinks, and souvenirs so high an average family is unable to see more than one game per year.  If they were owners of companies on the stock exchange, they would be among those being investigated for lying - just this time it would be for underestimating profits to deceive the government regulators.

It is one big shame that everyone involved in these "negotiations" don't remember that the original reason why they got into the world of baseball was for love of the game - not the dollar.