What Recession? We’re Ballplayers-NY Times =12/8/-8 (OT)

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Posted By: Bruce Dorskind

What Recession? Were Ballplayers


By STEFAN FATSIS

As long as sports have been played for money, someone has complained about how much of it the players receive. Salaries must come down or the interest of the public must be increased in some way, Albert Spalding, the owner of the Chicago White Stockings of baseballs National League, said in 1881. If one or the other does not happen, bankruptcy stares every team in the face.

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Sean Kelly
With the economy in free fall, warnings like Spaldings should carry more weight than the usual grumbling about overpaid jocks. And yet, big numbers continue to dance across the sports pages. The Yankees offer $140 million to free-agent pitcher C. C. Sabathia. The Knicks pay disgruntled point guard Stephon Marbury $21 million to do nothing. Wide receiver Plaxico Burress of the Giants apparently cares so little about protecting his new $35 million contract that he lets a handgun go off in his sweat pants at a New York nightclub. Didnt he know he was lucky to still have a job in these hard times?

The message for fans: recession or not, the gargantuan athletes salary isnt going anywhere. As the outfielder and free agent Manny Ramírez put it after helping power the Los Angeles Dodgers to the playoffs: Gas is up and so am I.

The four major United States sports leagues together generate about $20 billion a year. With broadcast contracts continuing for several years, much of that revenue is guaranteed. Similarly, many marketing deals are locked in for multiple years and, during recent good times, leagues have booked substantial gains from digital media and other sources. The hay is already in the barn, said the baseball agent Scott Boras, who represents several top players seeking new contracts this off-season, including Ramírez.

But leagues and franchises are taking their financial lumps: canceled corporate sponsorships, lower season-ticket renewals, lagging merchandise sales. (Team owners arent thrilled about their shrinking personal portfolios, either.) Since total player compensation in every major sport but baseball is allocated as a percentage of actual revenue, a decline in player pay is inevitable if such slowdowns continue. The decision for clubs will be where to inflict the relative pain.

It wont necessarily be such a difficult choice. As in Hollywood, superstars drive the sports business, for reasons of talent and box-office appeal. The shock over how much money elite players make has gradually dissipated since salaries began soaring with the advent of free agency in the 1980s. Its even arguable that the sports business is in a post-money era.

Todays fans including a generation that has grown up managing fantasy-team payrolls not only are inured to the fact that jocks make outlandish coin, they understand why and might even like it. It makes superheroes a little more superhuman, said Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Thats part of the allure of sports.

So big-city teams signing big-name players to lucrative contracts wont prompt angry comparisons to the plight of the working class. Money well deserved and well spent, one fan posted on the Boston Red Sox message board Sons of Sam Horn last week after the team signed the 25-year-old second baseman Dustin Pedroia to a six-year, $40.5 million deal shortly after he was named the American Leagues most valuable player. Sabathia, late of the Milwaukee Brewers, appears so unconcerned that the worsening economy will reduce his value that he has sat on the Yankees offer for three weeks while testing the market.

In down times, teams need marquee players to give penny-pinching fans additional reasons to attend games and bolster the teams bottom line. Youre not going to see Matisse and Cézanne available at your local dollar store, said Andy Dolich, chief operating officer of the San Francisco 49ers.

In addition, club owners always want to win. Theres enough ego and competitive instinct to make the big splash in free agency, said Andrew Brandt, who managed the Green Bay Packers salary cap from 1999-2007. The issue will become how dramatic a drop-off there will be beyond the top 5 or 10 players.

Thats where teams are likely to become more judicious. In sports where athletes enjoy guaranteed contracts baseball, basketball and hockey non-elite players are likely to see contract offers with fewer years and less money. More players could be forced to accept league-minimum salaries. Teams might be reluctant to release players or fire coaches still owed tens of millions of dollars.

Fans ultimately might expect their favorite team to be fiscally responsible, if for no other reason than to mirror their own economic problems. But they wont let owners use the recession as an excuse to scrimp on players. Last month, shortly after withdrawing a two-year, $45 million offer to Ramírez, the president of the Dodgers, Jamie McCourt, wondered aloud whether giving an athlete millions of dollars while average people were losing their jobs would be a little weird. She then mused whether Dodgers fans might prefer to see some of that money spent by the team on charitable work in the community.

Its a false choice, of course. Fans know that the labor marketplace dictates how much a player receives, and they are hip to how much teams are capable of spending. Indeed, the Dodgers last week offered Ramírez salary arbitration, which could obligate them to pay him as much as $30 million in 2009. (Ramírez has until midnight Sunday to accept or decline arbitration.) After her remarks were lambasted in the news media and among online commenters, Ms. McCourt said the Dodgers were committed to winning.

Dodgers fans will believe it when they see it the latter it being a string of zeros on the contract of a star. I can do without the shallow, self-interested explanations on the appropriateness of spending free-agent dollars while companies go under, the sports blogger Brian Kamenetzky wrote on the Web site of The Los Angeles Times. Put the best product on the field you can afford, period.