Huge Salaries are Killing Americas Pastime


As if he had known that the accusations would come about the Yankees buying their way to a National Championship, Derek Jeter stood on the podium and said “We earned this.” The only thing is, many people wonder “Did they really earn it?” That would be partially the question. For owners to obtain high salary players such as Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, and Mark Teixeira they have to spend lots of money. Many teams in smaller cities can’t afford such a high payroll. I think that having a salary cap in place would give the smaller teams more of a chance to compete with the big city teams like New York, LA, and Houston.

A salary cap could help baseball because it would mean that each team could only spend a certain amount of money on players. The cap might be something like $110 million dollars. Most significantly the Yankees, who spend $201 million on salaries would not be able to pay all of their players and would have to drop some of them. The more players they drop, the more it would help out smaller teams they would have a chance to pick up some key players. There are some reasons not to put in a salary cap too. Some people don’t want to risk a change and think that a salary cap might ruin the game, so there is controversy. They like to point out that teams like the Colorado Rockies can be really good and have low salaries.

Although there is not really a salary cap in place today, there is a pooling system. In 2009 for every dollar over $170 million a team spends they have to put about 40 percent of that in a pool for smaller teams like the Florida Marlins or the Cincinnati Reds. The problem is that the penalty for going over the limit is not high enough. Bigger teams have so much money they will gladly go over the budget and pay a little bit to the pool.

Baseball is a very high paying sport. The highest paid player in major league baseball is Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees. Alex, who gets paid $ 25 million per year plus endorsements from advertising and investments, keeps asking for more money each contract renewal. By comparison the highest paid player in the NFL as of 2009 was Julius Peppers of the Carolina Panthers who is paid $16 million a year. Both are huge sums of money, but baseball salaries are much higher than other sports. What’s worse salaries are steadily going up. The highest paid player in the MLB in 1999 was Kevin Brown of the LA Dodgers who got paid $15 million a year. Think to the future. If this keeps going on only the rich teams will be able to afford good players. Players will make $50 million a year and the tickets will be too high for the average American family to enjoy. Having a salary cap would help baseball. The commissioners, by having the power to change the rules, need to make a decision and put in a salary cap. With a salary cap in place, baseball will become a better sport and will once again become America’s pastime.