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Are MLB Salaries Too High? Take the Quiz to Find Out

By Steve Contursi

Jul 19, 2015; Phoenix, AZ, USA; Detailed view of a baseball on the field during the Arizona Diamondbacks game against the San Francisco Giants at Chase Field. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
Jul 19, 2015; Phoenix, AZ, USA; Detailed view of a baseball on the field during the Arizona Diamondbacks game against the San Francisco Giants at Chase Field. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports /
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To make a point about MLB salaries, take a minute to answer the following multiple choice questions. Answers will be given in the first paragraph after the quiz, so no peeking and please do your own work.

1) When Kim Kardashian appears at an event, how much does she earn?
A) $15,000
B) $200,000
C) $75,000

2) How much money has golfer Phil Mickleson earned on the PGA tour so far in his career?
A) $220,000,000
B) $80,000,000
C) $145,000,000

3) What is the base salary for NY Giants quarterback Eli Manning this season?
A) $26,000,000
B) $13,000,000
C) $8,500,000

4) According to Forbes, how much did actor Will Smith earn in 2016?
A) $75,000,000
B) $20,000,000
C) less than $10,000,000

5) According to Forbes, how much did Taylor Swift earn last year?
A) $85,000,000
B) $175,000,000
C) $65,000,000

Now, let me ask you one more question, and I bet you’ll get this one right. What was the value of the four-year contract that the Blue Jays offered to Edwin Encarnacion before he was signed by the Indians? While you answer that one, the correct answer to all five questions is “B”. Now, did you answer $80 million to the Encarnacion question? Chances are you did at the same time you didn’t know offhand the answers to the other questions.

There’s really no mystery to this at all. MLB salaries are plastered all over the place while these other earnings are not and you have to look for them. To make the same point, I’ll wager that whatever story you read yesterday about Cleveland’s signing of Encarnacion contained $65 million in the very first sentence. On the other hand, we are not likely to read a story about Taylor Swift that starts off with, “Tickets go on sale at the box office for a Taylor Swift show on June 23 for which she is guaranteed to earn $4.5 million.”

MLB Salaries Are High – But The Players Don’t Stand Alone

Yes, indeed, MLB salaries are high. But they are about in the middle when compared to earnings in other forms of entertainment. And maybe it’s just that we don’t think of ball players being entertainers and we tend to hang on to that age old idea that they are just kids playing a kid’s game, and they would play it for nothing if they had to. Or that the games they play are just like the pickup games 30-year-olds arrange on a Sunday afternoon for a keg of beer and bragging rights.

MLB salaries are directly tied to how often we want to attend a game or watch one on television. They’re measured in the same way that an actor’s salary for his next film is measured by the box office receipts from his last film. And we don’t care about that, do we? We don’t say Will Smith isn’t worth $10 million a picture. More than likely, the thought never even crosses our mind.

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There is something else that factors in here that may be even more relevant. Baseball is a $10 billion a year business. We spend almost $18 billion a year purchasing tickets to sporting events as a source of entertainment. And that’s nothing compared to what we spend on the lottery ($70 billion yearly). Moviegoers spend only about $8 billion a year. So baseball has its share of the wealth and therefore it stands to reason that a good chunk of that money should go to the ones who produce the revenue with the entertainment that they provide for us on the playing field. I really don’t see what the problem is.

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