Salaries of Professional Sports Players

The past decade has witnessed a staggering increase in professional sports player salaries. Baseball appears to be the sport where these increases have come closest to ruining the game. Unlike the parity between teams that exists in the NFL, the lack of a salary cap in major league baseball (MLB) equates to a wildly uneven playing field. Rising salaries and payrolls are cited as a major reason teams like the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers and other high-end teams are perennial post-season darlings while low-end teams like the Minnesota Twins and the Montreal Expos seldom make post-season play. As Minnesota General Manager Terry Ryan notes about rising payrolls: "Ten years ago we were in the middle of the pack with a $27 million payroll and today we are in the bottom three at $41 million" (Weir and Antonen, 2002, C03).

There are others who are opposed to this line of reasoning. Instead of blaming skyrocketing salaries on poor performance and a lack of parity between teams, some managers and experts on sports argue that bad management is to blame for poor use of available revenues. How else, they wonder, can it be explained that the $135 million payroll of the Yankees was not enough to get them to the World Series, even though the payroll figure "matches the combined salaries of the Giants and Angels" who did make the World Series (Steen, 2002, 14). Critics of the alleged lack of parity among professional baseball teams argue t

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on and in management skill cause losses for baseball franchises, not escalating player salaries. When Bud Selig worked with owners to find resolution to the alleged disparity among baseball teams, owners were fond of his plan for revenue sharing. In the barely averted work stoppage of this past season, owners demanded increased revenue sharing because they feel the disparity in local revenue sharing is responsible for the competitive gap between teams in big and small markets. It is because of the lack of limits on player salaries that owners view this source of revenue as causing the disparity. Revenue sharing includes a plan to boost income for struggling franchises. As Reid (2002) explains: "The basic concept of revenue sharing is that the entire sport benefits if high-revenue clubs share their profits to enable low-end teams to spend more money on players, increasing competitive balance" (D5). Revenue sharing is only one of the intended proposals devised by Selig and owners to increase franchise value and level the playing field among rich and poor teams and big and small markets. A luxury tax was also proposed as a means of achieving greater parity. Owners of low-budget and smaller market franchises argue that a tax s

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