Let me help out with all that money
Baseball star with obscene salary could do a lot of good in just a few minutes
Obscene – “…offensive or disgusting by accepted standards of morality & decency”
I read “$325 million man” in the Nov. 18th edition of the Journal. Just-turned-25 Giancarlo Stanton of the Miami Marlins baseball team scored a $325,000,000.00, 13-year contract with them to smack a ball around a field. Wow. In 2015, the Miami Marlins will play 162 games throughout their season (April – September). In 2013, the average length of time for a game at Miami Marlins Park was 2 hours and 56 minutes, but team president David Samson, thinks that’s too long and would like the players to speed up a tad.
That would mean that Stanton, in 2015, given current conditions, will be making $876.82 per minute to play baseball. But if the team president has his way, Mr. Stanton could be making even more than that paltry sum. All this for a baseball team whose 2013 fan attendance record was the worst in the entire National League!
I have a couple of nifty ideas of how Mr. Stanton might want to spend all of his hardearned cash: he could donate 18 percent of one year’s salary to purchase a new animal shelter for Bernalillo County. Or, if he is really philanthropic, he might fork over 45 minute’s worth of play ($40,000) to fund the cost of meals for the homeless at St. Martin’s Hospitality Center in Albuquerque, just one of numerous shelters.
He could make a charitable donation to supply senior citizens in Albuquerque with a hot meal now and then (68 minutes of his time = $60,000 City of Albuquerque budget for senior meals)
He’d have to give up the proceeds of almost two entire games (352 minutes) if he were to donate to Albuquerque’s S.A.F.E House (one of numerous shelters for victims of domestic violence) their current annual operating budget of $283,000.
Rather than the American taxpayers bearing the burden of paying bonuses in 2014 to senior employees of the Centers for Disease Control ($25 million), he could just give us little people a break and give up a year’s salary!
He could even help out the city of Phoenix, which in 2013 had a budget deficit of $25 million.
If he’s not the least bit philanthropic (and who is at the tender age of 25?), he might buy a decent one-bedroom apartment in New York City for the equivalent of 19 hours’ worth of play, or perhaps a nice 4,100-square-foot, 5-bedroom, 6-bathroom residence with a pool in Sao Paolo, Brazil, for the same number of dedicated hours of work.
But, he might even consider moving to Canada, where, with the current exchange rate, he can get even more bang for his buck: $990.95 per minute!
This outrageous salary constitutes a whole new definition for “obscene”.