Essay About Large Market Teams And Average Salary

Baseball’s Skyrocketing Salaries
Join now to read essay Baseball’s Skyrocketing Salaries
It can no longer be said that baseball is just a game. Actually, it
has been many years since that statement could be considered true.
Only recently, however, did the entire nation, not just sports fans
realize the extent to which this fact is true. Athletes, for the most
part, have always been paid better than the average American; but now,
with Alex Rodriguezs new contract, he is truthfully worth just as
much as the entire franchise that he plays for.
Baseball salaries have skyrocketed out of control, and something must
be done before the integrity of the game, and eventually, the game
itself is destroyed. There are many reasons why this will happen, and
this claim will be supported by the viewpoints of all involved,
players, owners, and fans. Many of the cold, hard facts related to
this salary increase will be shown, along with exactly what has caused
this exponential increase in pay.
While the outcry against the outrageous contracts that the players
receive only recently become national news, the anger towards the
players for this dates back to the beginning of the game. However,
since the creation of free agency in 1976, the increase in pay has
become out of control. In order to see this, one only has to look at
the first two years of free agency, where salaries doubled (Bodley,
2000, par. 17). Additionally, the average salary is currently forty
times higher than it was in 1976 (Fisher & Heller, 2001, par. 4).
Baseball was the first sport to have free agency, and as it currently
stands, the last to control it. All other major sports, basketball,
football, and hockey, have plans in place in order to keep a check on
salaries. As a result, they are not facing the crisis that Major
League Baseball will soon have to deal with. These sports all have a
form of a salary cap or some revenue sharing between the small and
large market teams. Baseballs one attempt at this, a luxury tax for
teams with high payrolls, has done nothing to curb the extreme growth
of salaries.
It is also interesting to examine the roots of free agency, which in
the beginning was a good idea. In December 1975, Peter Seitz, at the
time baseballs arbitrator supported a grievance that two players had
filed (Chass, 2000, par. 4). He ruled that when a players contract
to a team expired, the player was free to choose from all interested
teams. In theory, this is a good idea that is fair for players. They
werent property of their original teams after contracts expired and
were free to pursue other options, just as in the same way a
businessman could look for a new job. However, there was no system in
place to stop a bidding war between teams if the money was available.
It also failed to take in to account the human ego. If a player sees
a person with similar statistics getting paid more, then that player
will demand the same amount of money, and this cycle continues
endlessly.
Salary arbitration is another cause of the salary inflation, which on
average has resulted in a 100% increase of the average salary in
recent years (Chass, 2001, par. 18). In short, salary arbitration
occurs when