The problem with player salaries
Not that problem. No, not that one either. Uh, unless you're reading the subhead after everything else, in which case you were right the first time.
Imagine two guys in a room. You’re not friends. In fact, you don’t even know them. One of them is somewhat famous; the other, up until now, was just a name you’d seen a few times among a list of other names. Now here they are, in a room.
They both earn more money in a year than you will make in your lifetime. The somewhat famous one makes $8 million this year. Eight million dollars! That’s a lot of money! The other guy makes some other amount of money, an amount which you are not privy to.
The thing they are doing in the room is fighting over money. There is an amount of money that they need to divvy up. The guy who makes $8 million points out all the reasons it should go to him. The other rich guy gives all the reasons that the $8 million man didn’t really earn that much of it, and look, that’s just not how things work anyway.
The other rich guy seems to be right that the $8 million man is not as good at the things that make money as he used to be. You have seen it with your own eyes, and the other rich guy’s argument is excellent. Should the $8 million man now take home money that he didn’t earn? I mean, he makes eight million frickin’ dollars. How much does he need? Why can’t he just be grateful that he’s already rich? What is wrong with this guy? He just wants to take and take. At some point, enough is enough!
This, in essence, is the message that fans see every time players and owners squabble over money.
Oh, the other rich guy also owns stakes in large media companies that instill his point of view in the American people, and he’s way, way more rich, and he didn’t do anything this year to earn it either, and he’s an owner, and the $8 million man is a player. Feel like I should mention that, but only as an afterthought, like it always is.
There is an asymmetry in how the media presents money in sports. Some of that is because they have no choice: team finances are not public, so you can’t say “Jeff Samardzija made $19 million this year, while this member of the Giants ownership group made $10 million” or whatever. That asymmetry, difficult as it is to do anything else, is at best free PR for the owners, and at worst an inherently pro-management position that causes fans to side with the owners in just about any labor dispute.
There’s certainly more to it than this, of course. The inherent tendency of fans to identify with the team instead of the components of the team is very important, and also understandable: Buster Posey is great and has an excellent chance of going into the Hall of Fame, but he will be gone one day, and the Giants, as a larger thing, will not. A player is temporary; the team is eternal. This is what I, and no one else ever, famously call “rooting for laundry.” The team is the thing you support, and it is good for the team to pay a player less because then they can use the money in other ways that will bring the team a long-term benefit.
Many owners absolutely do not do this, of course, and instead pocket the profits and then cry poor to the media, but we don’t have proof of that. We don’t see the numbers that prove just how much Bob Nutting or Charles Johnson brought home when his team was shitty all year. Why, they might have lost money on baseball!
(Reader, they did not lose money on baseball)
But what we do see is that Brandon Crawford hit .228 last year and made more than $15 million. Brandon Belt took home $17 million and hit .234. Evan Longoria, who wasn’t even around for the good times, made $14 million and hit .254.
Charles Johnson wrote a bunch of checks that led to bad players being on the team and…what? What did he make? Why is that not information that feels just as vital as player salaries? Why don’t the same rules apply to everyone in the organization, everyone who’s a part of this thing that we all spend hundreds of hours every year (well, not yet this year) watching? Why is it only the players whose riches we’re made to resent, only the players who don’t deserve their fat paychecks in the lean times?
It’s because the owners have plausible deniability. It’s really as simple as that. Brandon Belt can’t leak to the media that, oh boy, this was a tough year and he actually lost money playing baseball. We all know for a fact that he did not. But if a team does it, maybe we have a couple questions, but there’s no way to know they’re lying, and of course no one wants to publicly admit to losing money — quelle embarrasment! — so we might as well take them at their word.
This creates a feedback loop. I care about the team, fans say, and this player was bad for the team, and they’re losing money, and they’re paying him lots of money, and that money is wasted. This creates resentment against the players. This causes fans to be pro-management in negotiations. This causes all the garbage-ass “Why should I pick between millionaires and billionaires?” takes.
Fans resent players for the money they make because they know how much money players make. Maybe that sentiment wouldn’t get turned around if they saw the team’s financial information — maybe the American tendency to glorify rich people means all hope was always lost.
But I bet if people knew the Pirates made, say, $100 million in profit and were constantly trading their best players away when they became expensive, and just cheaping out on the on-field product in every way imaginable, maybe they wouldn’t be so cavalier about calling players the greedy ones.
Or maybe they’d find a way to ignore it. People don’t have a great concept of how much more a billion dollars is than a million. Maybe, with numbers are that big, they’d settle into a South Park-ish “everyone sucks” conclusion that resulted in a naturally pro-status quo end.
But I think it’s worth a shot. I think we should know how much money every team makes, and what every owner of every team makes off of their investment. It’s only fair.