$1 Million Per Year Is Enough : Free Enterprise? Not Major League Sports; Let’s Invest Some of Those Billions in the Public Schools

When the world’s greatest ballplayer, Babe Ruth, got a raise one year during the Great Depression, his annual salary jumped to an outlandish total: $80,000.

“The president of the United States only makes $75,000,” a hostile reporter reminded him one day at Yankee Stadium. “Why should you get more than Herbert Hoover?”

Said Ruth: “I had a better year than he did.”

All these decades later, it’s a bit harder to understand why hundreds of athletes have begun to make not thousands but millions more than America’s president--whose annual salary, since 1969, has held at $200,000.

Nobody contends that ballplayers deserve 10 or 20 times as much as a president--or deserve 100 or 200 times as much as the country’s many underpaid, hard-working teachers, nurses and others.

So why is it happening?

Why is Rafael Palmeiro getting $5,406,603 from the Baltimore Orioles for a six-month job?

Why are the Dodgers handing over $2 million or more to each of eight players this season--for working three hours a day--and $3 million or more to each of four?

Why are the nation’s baseball, basketball and football teams paying the average athlete more than $1 million every year?

A simple, two-part answer covers all of the above:

* This is a sports-mad country whose many sports fans stand ready--day and night--to spend big money for tickets and for the products advertised on radio and TV by game sponsors.

* Sports teams are unusually profitable because their proprietors enjoy an unusual monopoly. With few exceptions, the men and women who own the 108 National League, American League, NFL, NBA and NHL teams enjoy, in their sport, the only game in town.

Exempt from the kind of free-enterprise competition that constrains and disciplines other businesses, they have been able, as a result, to accumulate the millions of dollars that the courts have in recent years forced them to share with the help.

It follows that athletes who are skilled in the sports that fascinate America--football, basketball and baseball--are just cashing in.

They are no more talented than skilled volleyball players--or schoolteachers.

They are simply cogs in the pastimes that are American passions.

And they should be paid accordingly.

Raise your hand if you agree:

No ballplayer is worth more than $1 million a year.

A PLAN FOR THE ‘90s

Beyond the least doubt, U.S. sports fans have cleared up two things. They will pay for big-league games--paying a fortune for tickets--but they are angry that so much of their money is going into the pockets of the players and owners.

Here’s a better idea:

* Limit annual salaries in team sports to $1 million.

* Limit each club’s annual profits to $2 million.

* Put the surplus into public education.

* Whether accomplished as a result of fan boycotts or by governmental action or with the voluntary, altruistic approval of the players and owners, that is what ought to be done.

Consider:

For the only time in the world’s history, a nation has developed a large, inbred, highly trained class of high-salaried specialists--athletes and their administrators--who keep producing so much wealth that they can support themselves comfortably and still spare millions for the fight against humanity’s greatest enemy: ignorance.

Minus free-enterprise controls last year as usual, the sports industry generated $55 billion.

The American scene is increasingly ironic: In an era of proportionately more and more money for sports, there has been proportionately less and less for schools, which, in so many districts, need funds for everything from instruction and counseling to construction and maintenance.

There is, in a word, a crisis calling to mind Thomas Jefferson’s warning that the future of democracy depends on well-educated people.

And the choice is real:

Should the billions that sports generates be used, to the last dollar, to make the athletes and their administrators richer and richer?

Or should some of this vast sum--all of it contributed by the public--be used for a cause as priceless as the public’s education?

One day, perhaps, it will be generally understood that all of the billions that Americans are willing to pay for sports events needn’t be frittered away on overpaid infielders, and that a portion should be invested in America’s under-educated school children.

And in time, perhaps, Americans will be able to identify major league sports as one of the saviors of the nation’s future.

SPORTS AS A LABORATORY

America in the ‘80s and ‘90s has been in the grip of a lie: that the basis for an ideal society is personal greed.

Years ago, that was demonstrably not true.

Years ago, U.S. voters kept a nice balance between individual rights and group responsibilities.

In those earlier generations, me-first people were always prominent, naturally--but they weren’t in charge.

Those generations built streets and highways and schools and magnificent campus buildings that were the envy of the world. They launched municipal parks and national parks--from Central Park to Yosemite--that are still the envy of the world. And, among other group obligations, they accepted the responsibility for shelters, such as poor farms, where the homeless could work and live.

Voters of a more recent vintage, unhappily for America, have started to think of schools and parks as a burden. They have even been reluctant to repair the streets that others built--or keep them clean if it costs too much--although, they reason, the streets are good enough for the homeless, because, after all, the streets are paid for.

Surely, America is capable of better than that. And conceivably, today’s second basemen could show us the way to something better.

Sports could be the laboratory for a national experiment testing whether the real America is represented by the me-firsters of the ‘80s and ‘90s or by the kind of men and women who in the 19th and early 20th centuries built the schools and the nation’s infrastructure in the first place.

If it turns out that .300 hitters will hit .300 as readily for $1 million as for $5 million, they can help turn the tide against greed.

Would they play as hard--try as hard--for less money? It seems likely. Until recent years, big leaguers stood in line to play for $15,000, $17,000, sometimes $25,000.

Before greed changed the face of America with the ripening of the me-first generation in the 1980s, most ballplayers, though radically underpaid by today’s standards, whistled while they worked.

Many in other fields have also often signaled that salary is hardly the first of their values.

More than one chief executive officer has confessed that he ranks money fourth, a distant fourth, to power, prestige and the fun of it all, and that he demanded $55 million only because he knows he’s smarter than a pal getting $50 million.

More than one home run hitter has demanded $3.2 million only because he knows he’s a better ballplayer than a pal getting $3.1 million.

Almost always it turns out to be not money but pride of accomplishment, in combination with the thrill of the game, that drives CEOs and shortstops alike--not to mention Hollywood directors, U.S. senators, managing editors, and other powerful or creative people.

Just the other day, Rickey Henderson of the Oakland A’s, probably the best leadoff hitter of the century, said it again: “It’s not the money. Ballplayers love the game. This is why we stick around.”

A national experiment would doubtless show that for most people, in fact, money is just one of the values.

SPORTS: WORLD OF CARTELS

Some critics have suggested that rock stars, rappers and other entertainers ought to be grouped with pro athletes in the grossly overpaid department.

And many are overpaid.

There’s a distinction to be made, though, between free-enterprise entrepreneurs and salaried employees.

Most rappers are entrepreneurs. They may distress some, but their income, contrasted with that of a salaried employee, isn’t automatic. They must please a number of listeners.

Any entertainment entrepreneur can be very good for the country. On tour, Madonna meets a multimillion-dollar payroll. It would be counterproductive to limit her income--or to cripple any other enterprising businessman or woman whose vision in any field leads to more jobs for Americans.

The history of the United States since about 1865 is conclusive that free-enterprise business entrepreneurs have made this the land it is.

But people in sports leagues are different.

A center fielder’s salary, for example, compared to a rock star’s income, isn’t nearly as contingent on his own personal contribution. If baseball were as unproductive, financially, as volleyball, center fielders would be unrewarded, too, regardless of the richness of their talent.

The same is generally true of others on salary. An American reality is that even CEOs--who, along with athletes, are so often vastly overpaid--are company men.

Even more clearly, NFL and NBA club owners are just riding along.

To buy in today, they must be very rich. But once in, they make no original or unique contribution to the financial success of their clubs. Their role is simply to hire reasonably competitive talent. Their income is generated not by responsible business practices but by their seat in a monopoly game that fascinates the country.

Their financial success rests essentially on league membership. For, as business units, sports leagues are actually cartels. They are associations of financially non-competitive business firms maintaining similar pricing plans, making joint revenue arrangements, and accepting the other fruits of monopoly.

Because that is so, and because of the national public school crisis, would not America be a happier land if the pro clubs contributed some of their earnings to education?

That would work no real hardship on the teams’ owners, who, in any case, earn a pittance at the gate compared to their clubs’ annual appreciation. The American League’s Baltimore Orioles, in a typical escalation, sold in 1979 for $12 million, in 1988 for $70 million, and recently for $173 million.

The NFL’s Dallas Cowboys are already worth $50 million more than the record $140 million they cost in 1989, according to a Financial World survey.

The magazine’s economists note that the value of most U.S. sports teams jumps about 15% a year, doubles every five years, and “will rise to unthinkable levels” in the next 10 years regardless of anything that their quarterback or shortstop or club president does.

In such a world, $2-million profits seem about right.

And in such a world, $1-million salaries are surely about right for America’s finest athletes, most of whom, in their early 30s, must walk away--giving it all up for life.

What’s absent in such a world--what’s needed--is a way of thinking and behaving that balances individual rights for Americans with group concerns for America. And the overriding concern is, or should be, the country’s future.

BASEBALL’S ELITE

The $5-Million Club

There are 10 members of baseball’s $5 Million Club this year--the players whose annual salaries are each $5 million or more:

Player, Position Team 1994 Salary Bobby Bonilla, 3b Mets $6,300,000 Joe Carter, of Blue Jays $5,500,000 Rafael Palmeiro, 1b Orioles $5,406,603 Cal Ripken, ss Orioles $5,400,000 Roberto Alomar, 2b Blue Jays $5,333,334 Jack McDowell, p White Sox $5,300,000 Jimmy Key, p Yankees $5,250,000 Kirby Puckett, of Twins $5,200,000 Roger Clemens, p Red Sox $5,155,250 Jose Canseco, of Rangers $5,100,000

The $4-Million Club

Members of baseball’s $4 Million Club--the players making $4 to $4.9 million this year:

Player, Position Team 1994 Salary Barry Bonds, of Giants $4,984,300 John Smiley, p Reds $4,975,000 Rickey Henderson, of A’s $4,800,000 Jose Rijo, p Reds $4,875,000 Tom Glavine, p Braves $4,750,000 Ruben Sierra, of A’s $4,700,000 Gary Sheffield, of Marlins $4,625,000 Dwight Gooden, p Mets $4,616,667 Gregg Jefferies, 1b Cardinals $4,600,000 Wally Joyner, 1b Royals $4,600,000 Danny Tartabull, of Yankees $4,550,000 Dennis Martinez, p Indians $4,500,000 Andre Dawson, of Red Sox $4,425,000 Mark Grace, 1b Cubs $4,400,000 Bret Saberhagen, p Mets $4,362,990 Frank Viola, p Red Sox $4,333,334 Jay Buhner, of Mariners $4,350,000 Barry Larkin, ss Reds $4,300,000 Doug Drabek, p Astros $4,250,000 Cecil Fielder, 1b Tigers $4,237,500 Kevin Brown, p Rangers $4,225,000 Matt Williams, of Giants $4,050,000 Larry Walker, of Expos $4,025,000 Don Mattingly, 1b Yankees $4,020,000 Chris Bosio, p Mariners $4,000,000 Greg Maddux, p Braves $4,000,000 John Franco, p Mets $4,000,000

* The teams with no players making $4 million or more are the Dodgers, Angels, Colorado Rockies, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, San Diego Padres and Milwaukee Brewers. Highest paid Dodger: pitcher Tom Candiotti, $3,650,000. Highest paid Angel: pitcher Chuck Finley, $3,875,000.

* No fewer than 189 baseball players are making $2 million or more this season--100 in the American League, where the Detroit Tigers have the most, 10, and the Angels the fewest, three. Of the 89 National Leaguers in the $2 Million Club, 10 play for the Cincinnati Reds, but only two for the San Diego Padres, three for the Florida Marlins, and four each for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Montreal Expos, and Colorado Rockies.