Jeffster81 wrote:SalmonsSuperfan wrote:Dodgers are signing Yoshinobu Yamamoto to a 12 year, $325 million contract. That's over $1billion spent in the past week on just two players, one of whom has never even played in the MLB!
Athletes' salaries are completely out of control. There's hardly a better analogy for the massive income inequality and growing gap between 'us' and 'them' than professional sports.
Tell fans to stop going to games.
why should people stop enjoying sports and a day out at a game?
how about:
-television networks stop showing so many advertisements
-baseball teams don't charge so much for tickets (stop building new ballparks with fewer seats but far more luxury suites to lower ticket supply, increasing prices for regular seats, and ultimately to provide for a wealthier clientele)
-more generally, baseball teams stop doing real estate development ventures like building condos and offices and other yuppie 'amenities' (every ballpark since 1992).
-baseball teams stop shoving gambling, cryptocurrency, alcohol etc. down people's throats to make a quick buck
-MLB institutes a salary cap and maximum contracts. in what other American league does a rookie sign a $325mil contract with a $50mil signing bonus? what other league has a payroll differential of $280mil ($342mil and $62mil) between the highest and lowest teams? imagine if an NBA team signed 3 players to maximum contracts in one offseason, adding to a team that already had 2 max players, and was still in the hunt to add one more near max contract (Josh Hader).
the amount of money generated by professional sports that has absolutely nothing to do with the sport is absurd and should be regulated. ticket sales is roughly 30% of revenue generated, a higher share than both NBA and NFL, but ultimately not the issue (besides luxury suites).
fans aren't the problem, market economics is. this just shows people that the market does not actually distribute resources efficiently like some people imagine it does. and fans aren't the problem that the league has absolutely no financial parity and that parity only exists in baseball because the playoffs are a crapshoot, each series is more influenced by randomness than anything else (unlike the NBA) which is why it takes 162 games to build a reasonable sample size.
it's frankly absurd and reflects poorly on American society. it's a perfect analogy for inequality. LA County has 75,000 homeless people, home prices in Compton and South Central (the so-called 'hood') are upward of $700,000, working class people must live in San Bernardino and commute for hours a day to Chavez Ravine or Santa Monica to service wealthy people's consumption habits.