Do These Guys Need All This?

When I was a kid, times were hard in this country, but I remember, once a year, around income tax time, the papers would print a Page 1 story about the biggest wage earners in society. It would always be Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM studios, or Alfred P. Sloan, head of General Motors.

They would put the dollar figure they earned in the cutlines below the pictures, and they are fixed in my memory. I remember Mayer headed the list one year with, like, $729,412. Sloan would weigh in with, say, $696,007, or the like.

Our minds used to boggle. Most of us couldn’t conceive of anyone taking down that kind of money. It was great escape reading. In those days, in our towns, many people made no dollars at all a year. They were out of work. The ones who did have work were lucky to be making, probably, 20 bucks a week or about $1,000 a year.

I was reminded of this in the last few days as the papers were full of the earnings of the newest crop of economic royalists, the guys who have replaced Louis B. Mayer and Alfred P. Sloan at the top of the ladder of wealth in America.

Who would you guess them to be? Right! One of the top wage earners in American industry today never made a movie, an automobile, a steel furnace or ran a railroad. He is Roberto V. Alomar and he gets $6 million a year--for picking up and/or hitting a thrown or batted baseball.

Now, when Louis B. Mayer was getting his $700,000 per annum, the greatest baseball player of his time--no, of all time--Babe Ruth was making $80,000 a year. And no one else in the game made even half that.

If anyone told you in the ‘30s that the day would come when a baseball player would be making 10 times what the world’s top auto maker or movie maker was earning, they would have sent for a straitjacket.

Yet the New York Yankees just signed pitcher David Cone to a three-year contract for $19.5 million. He got a $2-million signing bonus and gets $4 million in 1996, and $6 million in 1997 and $6 million in 1998. He has a “no trade” clause. The Yankees must pay him $5.5 million for the 1999 season--or buy him out for $1.5 million.

Thomas Edison never got that kind of money for inventing the electric light, the phonograph and the moving pictures. Robert Fulton never made that much for inventing the steamboat. Alexander Graham Bell frittered his time away inventing the telephone so the modern-day center fielder can have one in his car, and call ship-to-shore from his yacht.

These salaries, by the way, are being thrown around by moguls who only a year ago forced a strike that all but demolished baseball. They said costs were getting out of hand and they were going bankrupt. They said they might not be able to keep the game going.

So the St. Louis Cardinals sold for $150 million. The new owners promptly signed a pitcher, Andy Benes, who went 11-9 with a 4.76 earned-run average last season, to an $11.5-million, three-year contract.

I mean, what is $6 million a year--$120,000 a week? More, when you consider the baseball year is only seven months long.

Is there any way for a person who struggled along on $20 a week in the Depression to comprehend $120,000 a week? Even Louis B. Mayer made only $1,400 a week.

Baseball is in the entertainment business. It doesn’t produce for the world, it diverts it.

Originally, it depended solely on fan support, and the free promotion it got from imaginative newspaper writers. Baseball made money at the box office, period.

Then, the merchandisers moved in. They sold programs, they put food stands in the stadiums. They sold pennants and jackets with team logos. Sale of licensed products moved into the $2.5-billion range by the mid-’90s. When radio first moved in, owners considered it only a marketing tool. They used it sparingly at first. They thought it would adversely affect attendance. Far from hurting attendance, radio enhanced it.

Then television came in. Baseball thought it too would be only a promotional aid. But television is not anybody’s aid. It is in charge.

TV upped the ante. CBS forked over $1.6 billion for the principal rights to the grand old game. ESPN paid $400 million for what was left.

Baseball overpriced itself. It pulled back. But only after it had forced a value system it will be hard put to extricate itself from. Baseball players today expect, nay, insist on, megabucks. Even .230 hitters demand star salaries. They have to remember that even Louis B. Mayer paid top stars and directors grandiose sums--but the guys who moved scenery got union scale.

The moguls, in their zeal to win the pennant and become as celebrated in the community as their high-salaried stars, trip over themselves to buy that dream team. One result is, the player today is perceived as a kind of streetwalker hawking his services to the highest bidder. There’s a word for that and it’s not hero. The frustrated fan one year is howling “Outta the lot, Duke!” when the hometown hero comes to bat and “Strike the bum out, Lefty!” the next year when the same “idol” steps to the plate.

Baseball may be losing its soul. It used to be that only marginal players made the multi-transfers from one franchise to another until they had to look at their uniform fronts to see where they were or for whom they were playing. Today, the great players have 20 logos on their team trunks.

It’s all in the best traditions of capitalism. But is it necessary?

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine who was running a golf tournament (he still is, so I will not identify him) was complaining to a PGA official about the difficulties of putting together a select field. The costs were getting so high they were exceeding intake, and the million-dollar purses were menacing the charity’s cut.

The PGA official fixed him with a look. “Well, then, why put up a million-and-a-half to two million then?” he asked. “Put up $100,000, $200,000. They’ll come. What the hell else they gonna do? They’re golf players. It’s what they do. They can’t make that kind of money any other way.”

It’s true. What’s a .230 hitter going to do? Invent the steamboat? Make “Gone With The Wind”?