Professional baseball players have always been well paid. In 1869,
Harry Wright paid his Cincinnati Red Stockings about seven times
what an average working-man earned. Today, on average, players earn
more than fifty times the average worker's salary. In fact, on
December 12, 1998, pitcher Kevin Brown agreed to a seven-year,
$105,000,000 contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the first
nine-figure contract in baseball history. Brown will be earning
over $400,000 per game; more than 17,000 fans have to show up at
Dodger Stadium every night just to pay his salary. Why are baseball
players paid so much money? In this insightful book, legal scholar
and salary arbitrator Roger Abrams tells the story of how a few
thousand very talented young men obtain their extraordinary riches.
Juggling personal experience and business economics, game theory
and baseball history, he explains how agents negotiate
compensation, how salary arbitration works, and how the free agency
\u0022auction\u0022 operates. In addition, he looks at the context
in which these systems operate: the players' collective bargaining
agreement, the distribution of quality players among the clubs,
even the costs of other forms of entertainment with which baseball
competes. Throughout, Dean Abrams illustrates his explanations with
stories and quotations -- even an occasional statistic, though
following the dictum of star pitcher, club owner, and sporting
goods tycoon Albert Spalding, he has kept the book as free of these
as possible. He explains supply and demand by the cost of a bar of
soap for Christy Mathewson's shower. He illustrates salary
negotiation with an imaginary case based on Roy Hobbs, star of The
National. He leads the reader through the breath-taking successes
of agent Scott Boras to explain the intricacies of free agent
negotiating. Although studies have shown that increases in
admissions prices precede rather than follow the rise in player
salaries, fans are understandably bemused by skyrocketing salaries.
Dean Abrams does not shy away from the question of whether it is
\u0022fair\u0022 for an athlete to earn more than $10,000,000 a
year. He looks at issues of player (and team) loyalty and player
attitudes, both today and historically, and at what increased
salaries have meant for the national pastime, financially and in
the eyes of its fans. The Money Pitch concludes that \u0022the
money pitch is a story of good fortune, good timing, and great
leadership, all resulting from playing a child's game -- a story
that is uniquely American.\u0022
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