[Exhibitman]

I am not surprised that Jeter would not have felt a sense of duty to reach into his pocket and pay for the ball. It comes back to a culture of entitlement that celebrities have built around them. It isn't unique to baseball or sports. Celebrities are often comped and treated to stuff that the rest of us have to buy [remember the Academy Awards gift bags and gifting suites controversy a few years ago, where it turned out that the celebs were getting tens of thousands of dollars in high end merchandise free of charge in their swag bags?), on the tabs of publicists, managers, agents, sponsors, studios and others who want the 'glory' of their august personages. It gets to the point where they feel no personal duty to pay for things because they can simply assume that everyone will just hand over the goods gratis and/or that the agent/manager/studio/team will just take care of it. Case in point: a client of mine who trains celebrities was asked to use her facility for her client's unpaid photo shoot with a legendary photographer (I never heard of him but apparently being asked to sit for him is a very big deal). She agreed to let the client use her studio for an afternoon. The celeb and her team were very pleased with the space and the results and later asked to take it over for a big for-pay fashion shoot for a magazine, which would have displaced my client's business for a good chunk of a week. She wanted to help out but could not afford to close shop for days without compensation. I advised her to ask for a site fee [which is what any production would have had to pay for a space in any normal situation] to cover the lost income and the celeb decided to have her shoot elsewhere rather than pay for her site; apparently she just expected that the glory of having the shoot there would be compensation enough. From Jeter's perspective, he met the guy, signed some stuff for him, and the team gave him some nice tickets, so why should #2 reach into his pocket and add to the bounty when the team took care of it already?