In what seems like a couple of hundred sports years ago, Pete Rose announced he loved baseball so much he’d play for nothing. A short time later, he held out for $200,000 a season.
And now Shohei Ohtani is going to be paid what the late Jimmy Buffett would’ve called “ninety zillion dollars” just to play a game. The 10-year deal works out to $432,098 — per game — and that’s if he plays all 162 for the Los Angeles Dodgers, which he surely won’t, even if healthy.
The oft-stated belief that athletes should be paid “what they’re worth” is a ship that sailed long ago. What, really, is anything worth?
Could the house your parents bought for $8,500 after World War II be worth $850,000 in today’s market? Are tickets to Taylor Swift worth the $1,200 that scalpers are asking, and probably getting? Is watching the Toronto Maple Leafs worth $500 a night, even if they win?
The bottom line is something’s “worth” what somebody else will pay, be it houses or groceries or concert tickets. Or even the price to hire arguably the greatest baseball player in history. The Cincinnati Reds decided all those years ago that Rose was worth $200,000 a season, and they were right. It didn’t bankrupt them any more than Ohtani’s contract will bankrupt the Dodgers, who crunched their numbers then structured the contract so that he was worth $70 million a season.
So nobody should confuse “worth” with what somebody is paid “just for playing a game” because the games professionals play today aren’t just big business, they’re an economy. Trying to compare the salaries of current pro athletes to their predecessors is a waste of time and has little to do with what athletes from either era were “worth.”
They were worth what the market — or greedy club owners — agreed to pay them. Listening to today’s sports millionaires/billionaires rationalize their value is also a waste of time. Last week, I read a comment from a fan who was lamenting how a free agent who had signed a prohibitive contract then said he had to “take care of his family.” Asked the fan: “How much does it take to take care of your family?”
The best defence I’ve heard for pro player salaries is comparing them to movie stars. For as long as there have been movie stars, rarely did anybody complain movie stars weren’t “worth” what they earned. Fans admired them, perhaps envied them, or wished they could be like them. But as long as movie-goers flocked to theatres and bought the magazines or records, movie stars would be enriched, sometimes posthumously. Walking through a mall last weekend, I was stunned by how many items linked to “Marilyn Monroe” are for sale. After all, she’s only been dead for 60 years.
Pro athletes are just a different brand of movie star, rewarded for entertaining their fans.
I’ve long wondered if the day would come when a multimillionaire athlete would park his ego and say he had earned enough “to take care of his family.” Or if after reaching that threshold, he would forward his future earnings to people in dire need.
I know…that ship has sailed, too.
