Baseball Stew: Justifying big baseball contracts, Part one

Many years ago, around 1981, when I saw that the Atlanta Braves had signed Claudell Washington to a contract worth around $600,000, and when I learned that Bob Horner had a weight clause in his contract which would award him a bonus of, I think it was $25,000 or so, every time he weighed in (maybe monthly?) at a specified weight or lower, I wondered when the contract insanity in baseball would end. A player was being paid for staying in shape— isn’t that something an athlete should just be doing on his own anyway as a part of his job as a professional? By the time Barry Bonds, who was already pulling down millions and millions of dollars, but wanted more so he could, as he put it, insure that his family would be taken care of—as if the loot he already had stowed away couldn’t support the next 25 generations of members of the Bonds family— made more and more demands (read on) I had come to realize that the lunacy of soaring contracts and outrageous demands would never end. In many ways, the big contracts in baseball today just don’t seem justified, yet there clearly is no end in sight.

Lately, players don’t just clamor for salaries of seven and eight figures, they also insist that their clubs go beyond that. For instance, they might demand that their club provide hotel suites for them when they are on the road, or insist season passes for their family or a certain amount of first-class plane trips for family members be tossed in, and so on. I remember reacting to such demands by saying, “Why not just ask for another couple hundred thousand dollars, pay for your own tickets and accomodations, and not make yourself look so petty, pampered, and demanding?

There’s more. Remember how Bonds insisted he have his own private area of the Giants home locker room, complete with a huge TV and plush chair? He didn’t care that he alienated himself from teammates, he simply wanted more and more and more. As an entitled athlete he felt, “I deserve all this and more, don’t I?” By all accounts he may have been a very talented athlete, but he wasn’t a very nice human being– he went far beyond merely being querulous.

Recent signings affirm that there seems to be no end in sight. I think some general managers are guilty of falling in love with the showing, albeit often a brief showing, of players who shine in, say, the most recent World Series. They magnify what the player has done, and they seem to fall into the trap of projecting that player’s Series stats well into the future, causing them to salivate and overpay for that hot player’s services.

This year Pablo Sandoval played in 17 postseason games. How many homers and ribbies do you think he produced? Try no homers and a mere 5 RBI. He hit .211 in the Division Series then sizzled over a short (but important) span, hitting .400 in the LCS and .429 in the World Series. Result: the Red Sox sign him to play for more than $17.5 million next year and a truckload of cash for the next four or five seasons. Yes, the deal may pan out, may, but the Red Sox have to know they’re looking at a man who is a career .279 hitter who averages about 17 HR and 75 RBI per year— hardly Ruthian.

Many standouts of the 1950s and 1960s spoke out against overpaying modern day players because they weren’t being rewarded for what they had already achieved, often with staggering results, but were being paid merely for potential— for what might (but might not) pan out. Too often players stuffed with booty either fizzled or produced early on in their contracts only to prove to be way, way overpaid by the time their long term contracts ran out. Ludicrous, shouted old timers who worked exclusively with one-year contracts (and who were therefore paid based upon their most recent season’s showing). It’s equally ridiculous to people in fields such as medicine and education who provide tangible benefits to society— yet their incomes, especially when compared to sports stars’ salaries for merely entertaining people, is incredibly meager.