The inescapable sports story of the week has been Alex Rodriguez's decision to opt out of his contract with the Yankees and pursue more money on the free-agent market. While it amuses me to see an off-season story about the Yankees eclipsing the Red Sox winning the World Series, I find this incredibly tedious.
It's tedious not just because it's about baseball, but because the discussion is so ridiculously overheated. To listen to your average sports radio jackass tell it, Rodriguez's decision is emblematic of everything that's wrong with American culture. It's a greedy "me-first" move that's totally unjustified, completely beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior, etc.
About the only thing they don't blame him for is the collapse of organized labor in America. And that would actually be more reasonable than some of the things that he is being blasted for.
OK, it's not Rodriguez in particular, but athletes generally, but I half believe that the near-total collapse of the fortunes of organized labor in this country can be traced to the fact that the best-known unions around are all professional sports unions.
If you grab a random person off the street, and ask them about a union, odds are pretty good they'll think of one of the major sports unions, most likely baseball. And everything that's been done by the baseball union over the last decade or two has been a public relations disaster-- they had a strike ten years ago that ruined a season, they opposed drug testing, they supported players widely suspected of cheating. They're in the news more often than any other union, and they're always getting blasted for doing something idiotic.
A good chunk of the problem is that there's a lot of simmering resentment over the fact that professional athletes get paid vast sums of money for playing games. Even my father, who was an officer of the local teachers' union for many years, thinks that the salaries paid to pro athletes are offensive, and doesn't have much sympathy for their union.
And yet, if you stop and think about the amount of money sloshing around in pro sports leagues, there's nothing unreasonable about the salaries they get and demand. You can probably find accurate figures on the Web somewhere, but it's easy enough to Fermi-estimate things: Yankee Stadium holds about 50,000 people, and if you figure they get something like $30 per seat (a crude estimate at an average price), that's $1.5 million per game. They play 81 home games in baseball, so you're looking at a minimum of $120 million per season, just from the gate. That's before the $6 beers and $5 nachos, and the $25 T-shirts at the park. To say nothing of the merchandising and licensing rights outside the stadium, and the tv money.
So, yeah, Rodriguez is opting out of a deal that pays him $30 million a year. What's your point? The Yankees have the cash, and then some. They could pay him $60 million, and George Steinbrenner would still have enough money to swim in a pool full of dollar bills like Scrooge McDuck.
And Rodriguez deserves a big chunk of that money-- he's one of the best players in baseball, and pretty much carried the Yankees for a big chunk of this season. He's a big part of the reason why they fill those seats, and he deserves to reap the benefits of his labor.
Is it absurd that he gets $30 million for playing a game? Sure. But it's also absurd that the Yankees get hundreds of millions of dollars for putting on games in the first place. And if people are going to shell out that sort of cash to watch baseball, the people playing the game should get a big chunk of that money. In fact, it would be more absurd for the players to be paid less-- if they don't pay it to Rodriguez and other players, it's not like the Yankees are going to donate that money to charity. Whatever isn't payroll goes into Steinbrenner's swimming pool.
Is it selfish? Sure, but it's no more selfish than any other worker going in to the boss and demanding to be paid what they feel they're worth. He wants to maximize his personal income, and it's perfectly reasonable for him to want that, just as it's perfectly reasonable for a lowly cubicle dweller to do the same thing.
"Derek Jeter doesn't get that much," say the sports talking heads. That's Jeter's problem, and his decision.
"Tom Brady took a smaller contract to get a better team," they say. It's a completely different situation-- Brady plays in a sport with a hard salary cap, and had to take less money if he wanted to keep better players around him. There's no cap in baseball, and no realistic upper limit to what the Yankees could spend if they wanted to. The limiting factor for the Yankees isn't money, it's that there are only so many over-the-hill stars they can put on their roster.
The problem here isn't the amount of money that athletes are paid, it's that the number isn't being put in context. Yes, they're being paid millions to play a game, but the people paying them are worth billions. But you don't hear that when the sports media report on these stories, and it creates a false impression that athletes negotiating large salaries are doing something unreasonable. And since they're the highest-profile labor negotiations around, it ends up tainting the entire enterprise of organized labor, to the detriment of people who actually need and would benefit from unions.
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Yep.
Basically there's a LOT of money sloshing around and it's either going to go to the players or to the owners. And I'd rather it go to the players. At least the players have to do something for the money.
Since your point is about athletes being worth their salaries and you use ARod as an example, I feel that I must point out something about ARod that no one else seems to have noticed. Despite the wonderful INDIVIDUAL numbers that he put up this year, and every year, he seems to destroy baseball teams. Specifically: He started in Seattle in '94. In '93 Seattle was 82-80. In '94, a strike shortened year, they were 49-63. (He was a rookie and didn't play much, so he can't be blamed for all of it). In the following 6 years, they were essentially a .500 team, so he doesn't seem to have been much of a positive influence. In '00, they went 91-71 and based on his record, he jumped to Texas the next year for that obscene 10 year, $250M deal. Meanwhile, in '01, Seattle, without him, went 116-46 - the record for the most wins in a season. Texas was 71-91 in '00 before he got there and stayed at (approx.) that level for the 3 years he was there ('01-'03). In '04 Texas, without him, went 89-73. He started with the Yankees in '04. In '03 the Yankees were 101-61. Since then they have gone downhill. Last year they were 94-68 and lost in the first round of the playoffs. So, I would say that, despite his gaudy individual numbers, he is more of a detriment then a benefit, to a team. I predict that, if he leaves the Yankees, they will win more than 100 games next year. (unless they also lose Rivera and some other key players). And I predict that whatever team he goes to will do worse next year than they did this year.
This is an interesting argument, but I would put public sector unions high on the list of why the average American has a low opinion of organized labor.
Locally, we have had a number of strikes at the city and government level, some of which have had a serious impact (like a 1+ month bus driver strike). A lot of people see these employees as no different from themselves, but because of their unions they received much better pay and benefits.
If you work some low paying position and see someone with the same education as you striking so that they can make full benefits and 2-3 times as much money, you might be a little bitter about the unions, especially if the strike means you cannot get to work.
(As an aside, my father was the lobbyist to the state assembly for the local teacher's union. Every so often, a teacher would figure out who my father was, which led to so of them treating me very differently. It was weird, I am glad he decided not to be president - instead it was my 9th grade social studies teacher.)
Note that isn't at all clear that the "average American" does have a low opinion of organized labor.
It's more that the system is massively rigged against unions in the private sector. If workers try to organize a union, the company can usually just fire them. It's usually harder to do that in the public sector, which is why public sector unions have survived.