Quote:
Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby
Have gotten? Where have you been for the past few decades? According to Minimum salary: - BR Bullpen
The average salary for a Major League Baseball player was $44,676 in 1975.
Only five years later in 1980, the average was $143,756 - more than three TIMES what it was 5 years prior.
Five years after that in 1985? $371,571 - almost twice what it was five years prior.
Fast forward to 2022: the AVERAGE salary for MLB players is $4,414,184. That's almost 100 times what it was back in 1975.
Check on any politician's annual paid salary, any teacher, police officer or firefighter, any administrative assistant in an office, any minimum wage earner, any restaurant manager - and you won't find those kinds of salary jumps. |
Chalk it up to good marketing by MLB. The players union works hard to get their members (MLB players) a cut of the sports revenues/profits. The elite players that help generate the most fan interest, and corresponding revenues, get the biggest slice of the pie. The professions you are trying to compare to professional athletes are either paid by taxpayers or are relatively menial low skill workers that perform a basic function that doesn’t correlate directly to producing revenue and or profits (with the possible exception of a restaurant manager).
The highest paid state employees in many states are the coaches of the football or basketball programs of the State’s Flagship University (often making multiple times the state’s governors salary) because they want to attract the best possible talent and have a winning program, which results in huge amounts of revenue. Make no mistake, that highly paid coach has no union protection, like many other state employees, and if the team he coaches doesn’t win and generate revenue, his ass will be fired in a heartbeat.