Commentary : Time to Bring Salaries Back Down to Earth

Now watch what happens. Roger Clemens will go 9-15 with a 4.82 earned run average, the Boston Red Sox will finish fifth, and his excuse will be that Orel Hershiser is getting more money than he is: being only the second-highest-paid player in baseball dulls his competitive edge.

What we pay gifted young men for the rare privilege and the pure joy of playing baseball at the major league level is pathological (so is what we pay rock stars, featured actors on “Dallas,” chief executive officers who sell out their own companies and certain District Court judges, but I prefer to bash one group at a time). My favorite pathology is the Philadelphia Phillies shortstop who got a raise to $250,000 after hitting .187, down from all of .232 in 1987, while his team finished dead last.

Obviously, baseball executives are out of their minds. For all the millions the Baltimore Orioles are going to shell out this year, the 1989 edition isn’t going to be much better than if they kept Cal Ripken, Phil Bradley, Brian Holton and Dave Schmidt and brought in 20 other guys from Rochester and Charlotte at the major-league minimum ($62,500 in 1988).

Meanwhile, we are raising kids who think that Australia is near the Grand Canyon, who will work assembling things conceived and designed in Japan, Korea, or Singapore, and who will vote Republican forever. The United States may be the first society in history to choose illiteracy deliberately.

Small wonder, though, when a dedicated teacher can put in 40 years and never make in one year what a 20-year-old college dropout can get as a pinch runner. You have to be nuts to run a baseball team, and you have to be a saint to be a teacher.

What really bugs me is that every time I go out to Memorial Stadium or even watch a ballgame on TV I’m casting a vote for this state of affairs. You spend your life loving baseball and remaining faithful, while the jerks in the front office and the graceful young ignoramuses on the field reward your devotion with increasing contempt.

As greedy as they get, they know you’ll keep coming back. You’ll pay the freight as far as the gravy train wants to go--because the game on the greensward is just too beautiful.

Now, I really can’t ask anybody to join me in a baseball fans’ strike. As soon as the weather warms up, and I hear the buttery voice of Jim Palmer or the leathery one of Vin Scully, my boycott is over. As far as the eternal perfection of baseball is concerned, I’m easy.

But I do have this wicked idea.

How about setting a top individual income at, say, $750,000 a year--who will have the nerve to call this hardship wages?--and tax anything over it at 90%? Put the money in a government fund exclusively earmarked for the doubling of teacher salaries. If we pay teachers twice as much, we attract the sort of able professional whose idealism is mixed with economic self-respect, and we begin to phase out the English teacher who has to go back to school herself to learn how to write a clear sentence.

Yes, this is a major monkey wrench thrown into the mysterious machinery of the free market. But you don’t have to have a degree from the London School of Economics to know that there is something wrong with a free market that values a utility infielder more highly than a career public school teacher.

This is not a market that is producing a kinder, gentler, fairer, more informed, more productive, more civic-spirited America.

So write your congressman, your senators, your state legislators, or clip this column and send it to them: Nobody needs to make more than 750 grand a year.

Next year, let’s go to spring training with a clear conscience: with as much respect for learning as love for baseball.