The Drubbing

Well Congressman, if you are that angry at Citibank, I am going to have to ask you to not read the material I have provided you

Yeah, yeah, I know. Baseball players are evil, shouldn’t be trusted, selfish, they steal candy from babies, kick small children, and laugh at mentally deficient animals. They all refuse to keep the Sabbath holy, yell fire in crowded movie theaters, and remove the tags from their mattresses. In fact, I have it on pretty good authority that Miguel Tejada is responsible for the peanut butter scare, Roger Clemens fastball precipitated global warming, and Barry Bonds is the smoke monster in Lost.

So while the rest of the world focuses on the evils of steroids and the blasphemous idea that a human being might tell a lie, I am going to focus on some real reasons that regular working class people should be outraged at MLB players. The latest collective bargaining agreement contains a multitude of bizarre demands on behalf of the players. To prepare you properly, some of them are unconscionable, and most of them border on the obscene.

In Article IV-Negotiation & Approval of Contracts, we find the following gem:

“A Club may require a Player’s physical presence only once during contract negotiations…A Player required to be physically present during negotiations shall be entitled to be paid by the Club for round-trip first-class transportation and first-class hotel costs.”

So let me make sure I understand this one. You are a millionaire or soon to be millionaire (or at the minimum someone making $400,000 a year), and it comes time for you to negotiate with a team for your new contract. The team wants to meet with you personally to discuss options. You have one productive meeting, and the team wants to schedule a second to go over final terms and reach an agreement. You immediately become outraged at this incredible inconvenience and refuse.

Now, that might not be exactly how it happened, but take a second to think about it. Collective bargaining agreements generally do not contain random requirements inserted on a whim. They are usually reflective of a broader issue that has been expressed by a large segment of the population the agreement covers. So therefore, one would have to assume that a large contingent of major league players felt put out by having to actually appear at contract negotiations. Moreover, they were so moved by this apparent atrocity that enough of them made their thoughts known to the union which then negotiated for it.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to meet with a player, even just once, you are footing the bill for their travel and lodging; all first class of course. For that I stand in awe of the players association. It is not often you find one person, never mind a group of people, with such a staggering sense of entitlement.

In Article VII-Expenses & Expense Allowances, specifically, (B) Meal & Tip Allowances, the players really up the ante. This section requires that we suspend our sole focus on sports for a moment and think generally about economics and reality. Under the provisions set by this section, the road daily meal allowance for a player in 2007 was $85.00 a day. This amount is indexed to one measure of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and is roughly $89.50 for the 2009 season. So each day that a player is on the road he receives $89.50 to eat. Assuming that was a salary received over an entire year, it would equate to $23,270 dollars a year. This is where perspective is in order.

The federal government establishes poverty guidelines to help determine which families lack the income required to provide the basic food, shelter, and clothing required for healthy living. The 2008 number for a family of four is $21,200. So that means that a major league player making anywhere from $400,000 to $32 million dollars a year receives a little more than the annualized equivalent of what the U.S.

government considers adequate to provide all care to a family of four. And keep in mind, this money is not to provide for a family, it is just to eat (for our purposes here, we will ignore the obvious flaws in calculating poverty). As Chris Rock would say, I guess they need some extra cheese on their Whoppers.

Put another way, as of late July 2009, the annual salary of a minimum wage earner working 40 hours a week will be $15,080. Major league baseball players receive the annualized equivalent of 154% more than a minimum wage earner earns in a year…for food.

Given the current uproar in baseball, the media, the fans, and some grandstanding politicians will all find a reason to despise baseball players. In most cases, those casting stones will themselves be violators of one degree or another (think a Treasury Secretary that rails against executive salaries and perks after being caught having not paid income taxes on some of his own executive perks). However, if you really want to talk about something that makes major league players gluttonous boorish fools, focus on the ridiculous perks they demand for themselves while the poorest among them receive salaries that are nearly 700% of the median household income in the United States.

I will leave you with one final set of numbers to ponder. If all 25 players on all 30 teams donated their meal allowance to charity (assuming 81 games on the road a year), they could create a pool of $5,437,125. That would provide 362 people a year with AIDS medication, or 6,796 people a year with diabetes medicine.