Sports Not a Respite but Rather a Reflection of Society
Sports used to be a respite from the anxieties of everyday life. Nowadays it reflects, and frequently magnifies issues and inequities that exist in society.
Major league baseball came down really hard on the Houston Astros for their illegal signstealing scheme during the team’s run to its first world series run in 2017. Both the team’s general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch were suspended for one year for their roles in the scandal. In addition the Astro’s will lose their two top picks in the next two drafts and have to pay a $5-million fine.
Current Red Sox manager Alex Cora (the Astros’ bench coach in 2017) may also be hit with longterm suspension for his “role” in the scheme that involved the placement of television cameras in center field in Minute Maid Park. The cameras were used to steal catcher signs and convey them to hitters. Employees would watch the catcher’s signs throughout the game on a monitor set up between the Houston’s dugout and clubhouse. When a pitcher was going to throw a changeup that information was passed along to the batter by banging on a trash can.
Major League Baseball (MLB) rules prohibit teams from using electronics to steal signs. If MLB is going to ban Pete Rose from the Hall of Fame for breaking baseball’s betting rules (even though he apparently never bet against his team), than players who were involved in a sign-stealing scheme should also be banned.
The fact that Greg Schiano, the recently re-hired Rutgers football coach, is the highest paid public employee in the State of New Jersey is disturbing. The $32 million eight year package he was given is bad enough. The various overthe-top fringe benefits send the wrong message, e.g., use of private jets for recruiting, moving allowances, free tickets to family members, country club membership, annual apparel allocation, auto stipend, house hunting perk and a myriad of lucrative bonuses for getting Rutgers in various obscure bowl games etc.
Likewise, the record-setting nine-year $324 million contract that my New York Yankees gave to pitcher, Gerit Cole, is equally, if not more troubling. Assuming Cole is healthy during the duration of his contract, highly unlikely but let’s be optimistic, he should pitch around 36 games a year for 9 years (36 x 9 = 325). That means he will earn a $1 million per appearance or around $10,000 per pitch. That’s hard to imagine.
What does it say about us as a society that a baseball pitcher will make from throwing a single pitch roughly what an entrylevel worker at fast food restaurant will earn in a full year? Many Americans don’t seem to be overly disturbed by ever growing income disparities whether it is the gap between the super rich (last year Warren Buffet made about a million dollars an hour) and rest of us or between the salaries that entertainers or world-class athletes and coaches make and what the majority of us earn.
Americans seem to have bought into the notion of supply and demand hook line and sinker. We realize that very few of us have the ability to thrown a 100 mile per hour fastball and that those with that ability are going to command enormous salaries because they can put a lot of fans in the seats and sell lots of beer, hot dogs and merchandise for the team that signs them. The supply of entry-level fast food workers is much greater than of major league pitchers. This is the reason for the enormous discrepancy between the salaries for the two positions and the reason that a beer can cost as much at $19.25 in some baseball parks.
There is a story about Babe Ruth being asked if he deserved a higher salary than the President of the United States. He supposedly responded, “Sure – I had a better year than he did.” I didn’t realize that the Babe was an economist because his statement succinctly describes how salaries are arrived at.
If you can do something that many people place a high value on and only a few who can do it, you’ll be able to write your own ticket. But is this fair? I don’t think so, but you’ll have to decide. If you decide, like me, that it’s unfair the question is what can we do about it?
We should do everything in our power to make sure that college admissions, job selections and job promotions are based on merit and achievement, not arbitrarily on the basis of age, gender, race, or social class. In this regard, the federal government and the courts have an important role to play in establishing a level playing field and making sure that ongoing monitoring is in place to insure that everyone is given a fair chance.
When it comes to sports, each of us needs to decide how we want to spend our discretionary time and income. If a year or two from now Greg Schiano turns the Scarlet Knights football program around or Garit Cole is pitching a shut-out in the seventh game of the World Series, will I be thinking about the astronomical amount of money they are making? I suspect not, but that doesn’t make it right.
Irwin Stoolmacher is the President of the Stoolmacher Consulting Group, a fundraising and strategic planning firm that works with nonprofits agencies that serve the truly needy among us.