In baseball there has never been more lust for the marquee players and consequently there have never been larger undeserved paydays. For some extraordinary players, the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in salary can be justified or at least rationalized. Whether the Yankees should have offered anything close to the staggering $275-million contract they used to lure A-Rod back is open for debate. But, the logic goes, that’s the sort of gamble you can make on a man currently on pace to be the greatest homerun hitter of all time. (It’s also the sort of exuberance with a checkbook that only the bottomless-bankroll Yankees, and a couple other teams, can afford.)
These wild spending habits have bled over, unfortunately, into the hunt for lesser players too. Witness the recent Mariners acquisition of the middling Carlos Silva for the bargain price of $48 million. Sure he doesn’t walk people (36 BB in 202 IP in 2007) but he also doesn’t stop them from scoring (4.31 career ERA), hitting homeruns (1.3 per nine innings over the last three years), or getting base hits (226 hits last year). Why pay an average of $12 million a year for, at best, a number three or four starter? Why give him such a large pay boost from the $4.3 million he made in 2007? Sounds a little desperate to me.
But just how out of proportion is this spending? Well consider the rising price of cocaine. In November John Walters, director of the drug policy office, reported that depressed supplies of cocaine had led to a rapid increase in the price of the product. Coke formerly cost $96 a gram in the U.S. but has jumped to approximately $137, an increase of 44 percent. Which calls to mind the obvious question: are baseball players worth their weight in blow?
My highly scientific analysis used the average annual salary of these players and compared them to what their weights would fetch, on average, were they pushing weight instead.
| Kilo of Cocaine, Nov. 2006 | $96,000 |
| Kilo of Cocaine, Nov. 2007 | $137,000 |
| Kilo of Alex Rodriguez, average year | $296,377.78 |
| Kilo of Carlos Silva, average year | $107,512.20 |
What does this tell us? Maybe that the mutually abusive saga between Alex Rodriguez and the Yankees, with its operatic highs and mind-bending lows, owes more than I thought to that strange New York addiction to winning—tolerance of greatness causing intolerance of anything less.
Regardless the fact that the spending habits of drug addicts are closely mimicked by sober-minded baseball executives is unsettling. A little salary cap sanity might be a good thing.
Tags: A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez, Carlos Silva, cocaine, Mariners, salaries, Yankees
