COMMENTARY : Believe It or Not, Baseball Players May Be Underpaid

So your head spins every time you think of how much money major league baseball players are making.

You say these players have lost touch with reality when it comes to judging their true value.

You share the popular notion that these grown men are playing a kid’s game and should be grateful they get to spend their summers lounging in the sun, doing what the rest of us mortals only wish we could do for money.

Well, let’s put aside emotions for a while and examine the cold, hard facts. You may be in for a surprise.

You may learn that, if anything, baseball players are underpaid.

Granted, baseball owners, most of whom are shrewd businessmen, toss money at their players the way we toss a sawbuck to our kids for their weekly allowances. It’s as if each day another player becomes the highest paid in baseball. It was Will Clark’s turn recently.

Today, it may be some other guy.

But it isn’t as if the owners don’t know what they’re doing. They know exactly what they’re doing.

And the reason they do it is simple, really.

Without the players, the owners wouldn’t be making their astronomical profits.

The fact of the matter is that, as a group, the players are earning a perfectly reasonable percentage of what they generate. And the owners know it.

This is easily detectable when one figures out the way the baseball pie is sliced.

The 624 men on the rosters of baseball’s 26 major league clubs generate about five times as much money as they earn.

Consider the four-year, $1.5-billion total contracts that baseball signed with CBS and ESPN. That alone brings in $375 million a year.

Let’s conservatively estimate that local television and radio contracts bring in another $150 million a year for the 26 clubs.

And let’s say gate receipts bring in an additional $685 million a year, based on 81 home games and average attendance of 25,000 spectators, paying an average of $13 a ticket.

Concessions, programs and other such income producing devices bring in another $316 million, based on $6 a fan.

Finally, the clubs together earn about $100 million or so in merchandise royalties.

All told, these 624 men, who together are major league baseball, will generate $1.65 billion in gross revenue for the owners.

That, on average, means each player is responsible for generating about $2.6 million in direct revenue.

Compare that to the $550,000 or so that the average major leaguer will earn in 1990.

Major league baseball still ranks very much as an owner’s market.

So why do the salaries of baseball players cause so much controversy?

It probably has more to do with their public images than anything else.

Gripes from Joe Consumer, after all, aren’t nearly as frequent about the salaries of entertainers.

It is uncommon to hear people saying that Dolly Parton, Tom Cruise or Sammy Davis Jr. make outrageous sums of money. Jack Nicholson will make more than $60 million for his role as the Joker in “Batman.” And some of us didn’t even consider it a very good movie.

Still, it’s generally accepted that these performers paid their dues to reach the salary levels they enjoy today.

Baseball players, however, are generally perceived as spoiled and pampered prima donnas.

The consensus is that most baseball players resemble overaged adolescents--and we all know that adolescents with a lot of money can be dangerous.

Baseball players are likely to fight among themselves. They whine about their playing time, or which positions their managers want them to play. Some develop never before revealed injuries to explain their ways out of slumps. And a few only seem to produce in the option years of their contracts.

To make matters worse, baseball players have been known to directly insult the very fans who pay their bills, advising in some cases that they kiss their wallets.

Some players are not averse to reminding Joe Consumer that, in the world of baseball, beating rush-hour traffic means getting out of bed at noon.

Regardless of how much the players irk the fans, however, the truth is that the game is adored.

And that translates into sizable crowds and revenue in most major league cities.

And that, in turn, means the players have incredible bargaining leverage--like it or not.

The bottom line is that salaries in baseball probably will continue to rise. And, until these players grow up to be the role models that society thinks they should be, so will the fan’s blood pressure.