Pay Ball!

The last thing baseball needs is another obscure statistic. But here is one anyway, on how the cost of a win--at least for Tommy Lasorda’s Dodgers--has risen dramatically in the last five years.

Last year the average Dodger salary was $1,431,760, according to the Major League Baseball Players Assn. That for a team that won 63 games, the worst record in baseball.

With that kind of pay, the team paid players an average of $22,726 in return for each victory.

By comparison, the Dodgers’ average salary was $573,441 in 1988, when the team won 94 games and went on to win the World Series.

So the Dodgers paid each player an average of $5,153 for each win that year, less than 25% of what a win cost in 1992.

All Aboard

Vernon Jordan, the Washington lawyer and presidential confidante, is arguably the nation’s most sought-after corporate director. Now someone is quantifying it.

The Crystal Report, a monthly analysis of corporate pay and perks, in its latest issue analyzes the 1991 proxy statements of 10 publicly held companies that boast Jordan as a director.

The newsletter concludes that if Jordan could attend all of them, he would travel to 79 regular board meetings a year and an additional 95 committee meetings. Add to that an unknown number of board meetings involving private companies and various foundations.

Jordan also is one of the best-compensated directors.

The report estimates that his compensation from public directorships totaled $686,000 that year.

Maybe They Dozed Off

More than 76 million people tuned in to last week’s Academy Awards ceremonies at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Now if only someone can figure out what a few million of them were doing while their television sets were on.

In a telephone survey by Creative Marketing Consultants in Southfield, Mich., one in four viewers queried could not even recall that Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” took the Oscar for best picture.

Less than one in three viewers surveyed remembered that Emma Thompson of “Howards End” won for best actress.

And just one in four recalled that “Indochine” was named best foreign-language film.

Six out of 10 viewers were able to recall something that won’t please Oscar organizers: that previous shows were more entertaining.

Briefly . . .

It’s the etc. we’re worried about: “Tired of the earthquakes, riots, carjackings, smog, robberies, etc.?” reads an ad in Daily Variety for a home in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. . . . Premiere magazine has been advising new subscribers that due to a shortage of magazines, they must wait until the May issue for deliveries to start. . . . Maybe they should also combat bad spelling: An Orange County company called G.D.S. says it has developed a pressurized water system that will discourage vandals from spraying walls with “graffity.”