How much is to much?
...g market teams can. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if this continues and Major League Baseball continues to look the other way the sport will lose its competitiveness and this will further drive the fan away from the game. The small market team will never be able to compete with the Yankees or Dodgers if something is not done. Another problem I see developing in sports is that there is less loyalty with a team. Players are only interested in seeing how much money they can make. Fewer players are playing their whole careers with the team they originated with. Only a handful can say they played with one team their entire career. In essence, the phrase “show me the money” epitomizes sports these days. The athlete does not care about loyalty to his team; he only cares about putting money in the bank. It seems to me that today’s athlete is in a contest against his fellow athletes to see who can make the most money. This is not to say that baseball players are the only ones to blame. The average salary for a professional basketball player is $4.2 million a year (Source: NBA Players Association). That is almost twice as much as the average for a baseball player. And considering that a basketball team only has 12 team members, those salaries are really high when compared to other sports. The average player salary in 1985 for a professional basketball player was $330,000 a year. Basketball players only play 82 regular season games. They play approximately 10-15 pre-season games and if your team is good enough, you could play as many as 24 games in the NBA playoffs. The issue of small market and big market holds true for basketball as well as all other sports. We could go down sport by sport and see how outrageous the salaries are for professional athletes. Football players make on average less than their counterparts in baseball and basketball and it is arguably a more demanding sport to perform. The league minimum for a football player is only $250,000 a year (Source: NFL Players Association). In 1999, Troy Aikman of the Dallas Cowboys made a paltry $6.6 million a year, no where near the $25 million a year that Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers gets to play baseball. How about the $22.4 million a year that Kevin Garnett of the Minnesota Timberwolves gets to play basketball. The highest paid hockey player for the National Hockey League is Peter Forsberg of the Colorado Avalanche at $11 million a year. Average player salary for the three major sports: National Football League: $1.1 million/year Major League Baseball: $2.3 million/year National Basketball League: $4.2 million/year Another issue is the fact that most professional athletes do not want to be role models for our children. The greatest non role model was Charles Barkley. He himself admitted and told the American people that he was not a role model and never would be. Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers has had numerous brushes with the law. The latest incident was dismissed because the victims would not testify against him. One other issue with many professional athletes is what they do off the playing surface. While what they do is their business, it is magnified because they are a highly paid professional athlete that is expected to act as a professional. Many former professional athletes are broke financially because they did not have the right advice when it came to the huge amount of money they received as a professional athlete or they simply blew their money on things that only brought them temporary satisfaction. Salaries of professional athletes are out of this world. No one is worth $25 million a year to play a child’s game that we call baseball. Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees signed a contract worth $80,000 in 1930. Accounting for inflation, Ruth’s salary today would hardly place him at the top of the baseball payroll. Often players are rewarded for performance on the field. Some players will sacrifice this selfish desire inst...