A.J. Burnett must be hopelessly underpaid because he didn’t think twice about telling the Toronto Blue Jays that his current contract guaranteeing him $12 million a year just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
Hard to blame him, because fellow pitcher CC Sabathia figures to make double that by the time he reports to spring training a few months from now. Besides, there’s always the nagging worry that a new administration taking office soon just might be coming after some of his fortune.
Some team, perhaps even the Blue Jays, will pay Burnett what he wants. They will because this is baseball and, as super agent Scott Boras points out, the economic rules that govern normal civilized society don’t apply.
“In our myopic world,” Boras said, “there’s a lot of fixed elements that frankly are not as applicable to the outside world.”
took big gambles and lost for one of the biggest companies in the world.
They may listen and nod approvingly when Bud Selig says times are tough and that teams should watch what they do with their money, as he did in a video call to general managers meeting this week in Dana Point, Calif. But toss a top starting pitcher in front of them, and even the mid-market teams start salivating and begging their bankers for a loan.
The economy is tanking, Americans are worried about their jobs and their houses, and no one can tell you how things will be even six months from now.
Yet the Milwaukee Brewers reportedly offered $100 million over five years to Sabathia and not only was the silence deafening from the other end, but some baseball scribes weighed in to say it wasn’t even a legitimate offer.
Burnett, Sabathia and even Manny Ramirez have the right to earn as much money as they can in the relatively short time that athletes have to make their fortunes. And it’s certainly true that baseball owners make enough, with the major leagues bringing in $6.5 billion in revenue last year alone.
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Selig seems to understand that, even if most others in baseball don’t. He saw that baseball attendance declined last year for the first time in four years as fans stayed home because of high gasoline and ticket prices. He couldn’t have helped but notice that the World Series was the lowest rated ever on television.
The fact that Selig felt it necessary to warn general managers about the fragile state of the economy just as they start drawing up their free-agent wish lists was more than just significant, especially since any attempt to reduce spending could be viewed as collusion by the players’ union.
Selig worries, but the union doesn’t have to. There will be offers aplenty for the top tier of free agents, enough for Burnett to get a nice raise out of his current deal and more than enough for Sabathia to get an even bigger deal than the six-year, $137 million pact signed last year by Johan Santana.
Boras didn’t seem too worried, either, talking Wednesday about how baseball revenues have doubled in the last seven years and that the franchises that have increased most in value did so because they were winners. He reiterated his belief that baseball is mostly insulated from the financial crisis, and that the top teams know what their revenues will be in the near future because of long-term TV contracts and marketing deals.
st in the near future, for the richest teams. But is that enough to justify being reckless by offering the biggest guaranteed contracts in American sports at a time when the economic future is so uncertain?
Ultimately, that’s a call only team owners can make. So far most of them have gotten even richer than they were before getting into the baseball business, so they either know what they’re doing or simply bought at the right time.
Still, there’s little doubt that the risky business of signing free agents has now gotten even more risky.
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Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlbergap.org
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