The Red Sox signed free-agent lefty David Price to a seven-year, $217 million contract on Tuesday, making Price the highest paid pitcher in baseball history. It even includes an opt-out clause, according to Ken Rosenthal, in case Price feels he is in position to sign an even bigger deal three years from now. And he very well might.
Price is excellent — the legit, frontline ace the Red Sox desperately need and a perennial Cy Young contender. But he is not the best player in baseball or even the best pitcher in baseball, and he will now make more in base salary than every single player in the NFL and the NBA. This is nothing new: 27 of the top 30 richest sports contracts belong to baseball players, according to Wikipedia. But for some reason, it nonetheless angers some fans certain that it means the MLB should have a salary cap like the NBA and NFL do.
Nonsense. The only people who should be mad about the size of MLB contracts are their peers in the other major sports leagues, and those guys should probably address any concerns to their union leadership.
The distribution of wealth in affiliated baseball isn’t anything like fair: The system favors veterans like Price, who are successful enough to reach free agency in their primes, while forcing most players to work for the league minimum or something close to it in their first three seasons — no matter how good they are — and allowing the minor leaguers against whom they ply their trade to work for less than minimum wage. It’s not a perfect system, even if it is the one that reaps the biggest contracts for superstar players. But none of its issues would be resolved by adding a salary cap.
(PHOTO: AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)
Adding a salary cap — and it’s shocking that this isn’t more obvious to people — would mean only putting more money into the pockets of the billionaire owners. And billionaire owners don’t even hit home runs. Baseball players actually make a far smaller share of the league’s total revenue than they did 20 years ago, so one could easily argue the game would be better served adding a salary floor, or at the very least making significant, mandatory increases to the Major League minimum and the standard seven-year minor league contract.
And while it’s true that having the type of financial flexibility to sign top-tier free agents like Price gives big-market clubs like the Red Sox an advantage, it’s hardly an overwhelming one: The Royals just won the World Series, recall, with an opening day payroll in the league’s bottom half. The Mets, the club the Royals beat in the World Series, spent even less.
Some seem convinced that baseball players — professional entertainers at the very top of their field who endure an arduous schedule — don’t deserve so much money for playing a kids’ game, and argue that everyone in the sport should make less so the savings can be passed on to the fans. But that’s pitifully naive: Those billionaire owners became billionaires because they’re shrewd businessmen (or their parents were), and the prices we pay for tickets and cable packages are the prices they know the market will bear. And unless the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come makes 30 stops this Dec. 24, that’s just not going to change.
As long as money keeps pouring into baseball, baseball players are going to get richer and richer contracts. Deals like Price’s are a reflection of the game’s strength, not a damnation of its excesses.
