Result: In current terms, the average salary of a major league player has jumped from about $140,000 when the Senators left town to nearly $2.5 million today, according to statistics published by Michael Haupert of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. A handsome, polite infielder with home run power, Alex Rodriguez, stands to make more than a quarter-billion dollars over his career.
Don't cry for the owners, though. "It's practically impossible to actually lose money owning a baseball team," according to Rodney Fort, a leading sports economist from Washington State University.
(Tom Kurry)
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Owners can afford to shovel that jing into the locker rooms because they have figured out new ways to rake in more money. Today's fan often perches the family in premium-priced "club seats" purchased by an employer as a business expense. There, waiters deliver chow and cocktails fresh from restaurants around the ballpark. Meanwhile, TV monitors show the game as it appears on the local sports network -- which is, in many cases, owned by the team.
And beyond such obvious revenue sources are the less apparent ones. Suppose an owner is also a lawyer, Fort says, and the team buys its legal services from his law firm. "It looks like a cost, but actually it's money flowing to an owner.
"Then there are the values beyond cash," the professor continues. "If you own the baseball team, you're going to have access to all the downtown decision-making -- decisions of government boards, zoning departments, all kinds of stuff. And this information can be quite valuable when it comes to other business opportunities."
Not to mention the fancy accounting: "Suppose I buy a team," Fort postulates, "and I also own the stadium and a piece of the regional sports network." Obviously, someone who can afford to buy these various enterprises is the kind of person who has a complicated tax return. "Baseball gives me a lot of values in terms of being able to reveal revenues where they are most advantageous. . . . Depending on the year, I can show less on the balance sheet of the team and more on the balance sheet of the stadium or the network" -- whichever produces the lowest tax burden.
All this leads us to the hidden beauty of player salaries: They're tax-deductible! Yes, some people give their money to Children's Hospital or the Red Cross. Some give their money to Pedro Martinez. It's all worthwhile in the eyes of the IRS.
Fiscally speaking, a ballplayer is an asset, not an employee. He's not much different, in an auditor's eyes, from a new smelter or fish-filleting machine. Fans mourn the gradual cooling of a pitcher's fastball, but to the owner, it's not age, it's depreciation. Writing an eight-digit paycheck is less painful when Uncle Sam is kicking in.
Clark Griffith was a pretty good little pitcher for Chicago during the 1890s. At the end of his career, he moved to Washington to manage the Senators. He scraped up the money to buy the team in 1919. Baseball was his only business. Folks like that don't exist today.
"The typical owner of a baseball team is now either a conglomerate . . . or a wealthy individual who owns a (sometimes) related business and operates the baseball team on the side," Haupert has written. "This transition began to occur when the tax benefits of owning a baseball team became significant."
Player salaries are always good for a rant on sports radio, but hey: The players are the ones who pitch, hit and throw. Why shouldn't they share the wealth? What worries some owners is the ability of a few rich teams to buy their way into the playoffs year in and year out, paying salaries more appropriate for the sultan of Brunei than the Sultan of Swat. Small club owners want to squeeze more revenue-sharing from the likes of Yankees boss Steinbrenner. Otherwise, they warn, the Yankees will win every year, and fans will stop caring about the sport.
But is it true that baseball needs this so-called parity? It never did before. Consider the 1950s, baseball's zenith in many minds, when men named Mays and Mantle and Snider played double-headers to the reedy accompaniment of the stadium organist. Nine of 10 World Series in that decade featured at least one of the three New York teams. Half the years, the Series was an all-New York affair.
"The amazing thing," says Fort of the disparity among teams, "is that fans don't seem to bitch about it too much."
Fort has a theory: Just as the retail industry covers a spectrum from Saks Fifth Avenue to Wal-Mart, baseball runs the gamut from the Yankees to the Kansas City Royals. Some markets have the wealth and the interest to demand the best, while other markets are too poor, too small or too content to support a consistent winner. Saks makes money selling premium products; Wal-Mart makes money selling generics. In both cases, the money is equally green.
The implications of this are both powerful and unnerving. Washington might get exactly the team we are willing to demand.
What a terrible responsibility.
IT TAKES WEEKS TO SECURE AN INTERVIEW WITH WASHINGTON NATIONALS PRESIDENT TONY TAVARES. You figure he must be at spring training. Then you meet him, and his broad face is a bit on the pale side. Turns out he's just been busy, too busy for spring training.
What's the point of running a baseball franchise if you can't hang out at spring training?
The office he occupies, courtesy of a local law firm, has the almost-empty feel of a bachelor's first apartment. A few ball caps are scattered on a shelf; a few papers are piled on the standard-issue mahogany furnishings. If Tavares had a refrigerator, you would expect it to contain four bottles of beer, half a jar of old salsa and some moldy takeout.
"All work and no play is making me a dull boy," he says.
The frenzy began the moment last
season ended. Tavares hurriedly packed up the operation formerly known as the Montreal Expos. Montreal and D.C. make an apt pairing -- if the Expos had survived another 30 or 40 years, the club was on track to rival the Senators in terms of enduring lack of luster. Born as an expansion franchise in the 1969 season, the Expos racked up 35 years of futility, brightened only by a couple of near-pennants back in the days of shag haircuts and pastel polyester uniforms. The best season in franchise history, most experts agree, was the one that didn't happen. In 1994, when the 'Spos led the NL East by six games and the players went on strike.
Montreal was a club where future stars prepared for free agency and washed up stars fell back to Earth -- a team equal parts acne and osteoporosis. Commissioner Selig proposed killing the franchise a few years ago. Instead, major league owners pooled their money, bought the team and began hunting for a town where people actually like baseball. It's hard to say whether Montreal fans were upset, because they were as rare as pandas; last season, the club averaged fewer than 10,000 spectators per game.
Is Washington a place that likes baseball? So far, signs are mixed. Season-ticket sales have gone gangbusters. Would-be Nats fans flocked to Florida for the preseason. On the other hand, in December the D.C. Council nearly scrapped the deal that has brought baseball back to Washington, and many of the residents thronging public council meetings seemed pleased by the prospect.
Tavares appears sanguine. He, at least, believes this will go well. Baseball, he ventures, "is a sport that has endured. It's something passed down from dad, from a grandfather, a grandmother, a mom, who takes you to your first game . . . And you never forget the smell of the hot dogs and the popcorn, the noise of the crowd yelling. The whole ambiance of the event somehow captures people."
He continues: "At certain periods of the game, it is like -- I don't know -- like sitting in a pasture looking at flowers. There's a peacefulness. And then something happens, and the crowd erupts into raucous applause. Then everything calms back down for a moment."
