Sports Salaries
...king his family to the ballpark. These days it takes a arm and a leg just to buy a bleacher ticket and a meal from the concession. These days sports are truly a rich mans game all the way around. What the fan doesn’t realize is that the high priced contracts are not the only thing that drives up ticket prices. High stadium leases drive up prices as well, it is like a common business if you have to pay a high rent then chances are the prices of your stores merchandise will be high to make up for that. In fact high stadium leases as well loss of revenue have cost some sports franchise to relocate. This has become a big problem recently in sports due to the fact that more and teams are moving.For example in the National Football League in the past three years, the Browns have moved out of Cleveland to become the Baltimore Ravens and the Raiders and Rams have both moved out of Los Angeles to Oakland and Saint Louis.The latter has become a huge problem do to the fact that it has left the National Football League without a team in one of televisions largest markets. But don’t worry Los Angeles it seems a lowly expansion team will be headed your way soon. Television plays a huge part in the big money contracts of today. You may be asking yourself how well the National Football League, Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association and National Hockey League all have television contracts with the major networks for billions of dollars. With this extra money floating around the teams can sign players to bigger contracts. This proves my point again that the athlete is just getting his piece of the pie and how can anyone in their right mind fought them, because you would have to be an idiot not to take all that money if it was shoved in your face. No one seems to have a problem with big company CEO’s such as Disney’s Michael Eisner pulling down hundreds of millions of dollars a year but yet they fought the athlete for doing basically the same thing. I feel athletes should try to get as much money as they can, because the fact is that athletes careers last only a short time, about four years on the average, this means that in a blink of an eye their livelihood could be over. Meaning that most of these guys who do not have college degrees would be broke if they did not invest wisely. A prime example of this is Fulton Walker, who played professionally in the National Football League for the then Los Angeles Raiders and Miami Dolphins. Walker was a Super Bowl hero after he returned a kickoff ninety-eight yards for a touchdown in Super Bowl XVII versus the Washington Redskins. Injuries forced his career to end prematurely and sense Walker was not around during the era of the big money contract, so now he hardly lives the life of a gridiron hero. He lives at the base of my neighborhood in a double-wide trailer struggling to make it as a substitute teacher. Walker is not alone, and this is why I think athletes should make all the money they can possibly make during their career. A positive example of what can happen to a injured player if they have that big money contract is Brian Bosworth. Bosworth a all-American linebacker from the University of Oklahoma, signed a guaranteed contract with the Seattle Seahawks for 8 years/ 12 million dollars. Bosworth suffered a career ending shoulder injury in his second season and because of his guaranteed money he was able to live a good life after football, he is currently an actor and a successful businessman. The biggest problem I have with the high salaries of athletes is that it has taken the competitiveness out of sports such as baseball, which does not have a salary cap. In Major League Baseball there are big market teams and there are small market teams. Big market teams include teams such as the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, Baltimore Orioles. Small market teams include the Pittsburgh Pirates, Montreal Expos and the Milwaukee Brewers. The problem in baseball is that all the good players who become free agents go to the big market teams. Just look at this years free agent signings for example: Kevin Brown/ Dodgers, Albert Belle/ Orioles, Mo Vaughn/ Angels and finally Bernie Williams to the Yankees. No player wants to play in a small market there is no marketability for his skills there and even if he did the small market team wouldn’t have the money to sign him anyway. Small market teams routinely have to develop their talent in their minor league system, which is good, but what is bad is that these teams then don’t have the money to sign them when their contracts are in a sense they developed him only to lose him to a large market team. A prime example of this is the Montreal Expos, if the Expos were in a big market they would be great,but the problem is they are in a small market town with a old, out of date ballpark. The list of former Expos’ players reads like a whose who of baseball. Pedro Martinez, John Wetteland, Tim Raines, Larry Walker, Moises...