The insane economics of Baseball
Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder have a combined $454 million reasons to smile.
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I wish I could hit a curve ball. I wish I could stay back on an off-speed pitch. I wish I could just flat out rake at the plate. My parents did not bless me with athletically-gifted genes and the amount of work I put into improving those genes wasn’t enough to extend my baseball playing career past my high school graduation in 1983.
If I only knew then what I know now! Maybe, just maybe, I could be set financially for my lifetime playing the game I love rather than working ten hours per day for 40 plus years of my life. I wish…
Prince Fielder recently signed a nine-year $214 million contract with the Detroit Tigers. His contract comes on the heels of Albert Pujols’ 10-year, $240 million deal with the Los Angeles Angels.
Sports talk shows have spent hours on-air debating who the greatest athletes are. I contend it is a marathon runner who can run 105 laps (26.2 miles) around a track at approximately 75 seconds per lap and then crank out a handful of laps towards the end at 60-65 seconds each expressly designed to drop the other runners. Go see how many laps in a row you can run at 75 seconds. Some say it’s the athletes who have tremendous hand-eye coordination like baseball players who try and make ‘square’ contact between a round ball and a round bat. Whomever you favor in this debate, no group of athletes has reaped the benefits of our capitalistic form of economy more so than the baseball player.
Pujols and Fielder signed two of the four biggest contracts in Major League Baseball history (Alex Rodriquez signed the other two). How can these kinds of dollars ever make sense to the average working-class American? According to the Social Security Administration, the average yearly income in 2010 was just under $40,000. Let’s look at how Pujols and Fielder’s paydays will break down.
Albert Pujols is a career .328 hitter, who averages 40 home runs per year. He averages 155 games played per season and 662 plate appearances. He is the owner of a .420 on base percentage (OBP) and an astronomical 1.037 on base and slugging percentage (OPS). These are surely Hall of Fame-worthy numbers. Fielder is a career .282 hitter averaging almost 32 home runs per year. Fielder averages 142 games per year and 584 plate appearances. He has lifetime .390 OBP and .930 OPS.
How does this translate financially? Fielder will be making $23,777,777 per season. Last season, Fielder averaged 3.80 pitches per plate appearance. That number times 584 plate appearances is 2,219 pitches seen per season. This translates to $10,715 per pitch or $40,719 per plate appearance. At an average of 4.11 plate appearances per game, Fielder is knocking down a cool $167,355 for every game he plays this season.
Pujols numbers are much more pedestrian. At $24,000,000 per season, Pujols averages only 3.65 pitches per at bat. This translates to 2.416 pitches per season. Pujols will average only $9,934 per pitch and $36,258 per at bat. With 4.27 plate appearances per game, Pujols will earn a meager $154,856 per game.
The average American who makes $40,000 per year will earn $1.6 million dollars over the course of a 40-year career. Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder will generally make the average income of the typical American worker every time they have come to bat in a Major League game and will have accumulated a lifetime of income after 10 games this season.
Are these salaries right or wrong? You can argue both sides. It is right because of our system of economics. Major League Baseball has created a demand and Pujols and Fielder fill this demand. Good for them. They win. We as baseball fans support these salaries by our attendance at the games and for every $6 hot dog or $8 beer we buy. Our country is based on the principals of capitalism and free-enterprise economics. To this end, Pujols and Fielder have succeeded exponentially.
Athletes, and the sports they play, give us release from the stress of our everyday lives. Through their athletic endeavors, they can unite communities, and in some cases, entire nations for a period of time. Is that their only value though? When we as average Joes work, we generally provide a good or service that helps someone get what they need. Those against these high salaries argue that there are no other redeeming qualities to the service they provide and that the salaries are absurd.
I tend to lean towards the ‘good for them’. As stated earlier, they have filled a demand and there are people willing to pay silly amounts of money to meet this demand. Professional athletes have fairly short time frames to earn a living from their sport so I understand the higher salaries. Fielder and Pujols will earn a lifetime of money by mid-April this year and the hope among their fans is that these high-priced athletes understand the blessings they have been given and use them to make positive contributions to the society that enables them to live the way they do. Many athletes do wonderful things with their time and money and to those who do, we say thank you.
I wish I had taken more batting practice; more time hitting in a cage; more time taking grounders. But I didn’t. So I will continue to toil in anonymity for a lifetime and dream of making square contact with the hanging breaking pitch or that fastball that was grooved down the middle. I guess I’d better go get my son and get busy. Oh wait, he has my genes. I think I’ll just go and try and ‘square’ up a Powerball ticket.
Jeff Lehman is a blog contributor for Gold Star Games, a leading tailgate gear supplier specializing in NFL, NCAA and MLB related apparel. You can comment via Twitter at @2460jeff.
