How long will it be until we see the first billion-dollar player. 

Bleacher Report listed twelve major league baseball players who should get contracts of a hundred million dollars or more during the off-season. Sadly, for Cubs fans, Cody Bellinger is on that list, meaning he won’t be a Cub next year. 

Last season, there were fourteen $100,000,000 contracts issued. Not one led the major leagues in any positive stat this year. In fact, the Yankees Aaron Judge’s 37 homers tied him for tenth in home runs, the best showing by any of these top fourteen entrants to the hundred-million-dollar club. He’s coming off a new contract paying him $360 million over 9 years. This means the Yanks paid him over a million bucks per homer. 

Not one of the fabulous fourteen batted above .300. It certainly can be done, as nine other guys did it in 2023, led by a sterling .354 average from Luis Arrez of the Miami Marlins. Bellinger hit .307. 

Carlos Correa of the Minnesota Twins was so grateful to get paid nine figures that he went out and hit a paltry .230 this past summer. Before hitting so lightly, he had been given a contract for $200 million over 6 years. Perhaps he should consider giving some money back. 

You would think the four pitchers in the fabulous fourteen would have been an awesome stable of pitchers, but if you thought that, wrong! They went a combined 13 wins and 18 losses. Carlos Rodon of the Yankees was given a $162 million contract over seven years so he could produce a 3-8 record with an earned run average of 6.85.

Conversely, there was a young man who toiled for the Boston Red Sox and later the New York Yankees, who made a total of $785,900 total in his 22-year career. 91 years after Babe Ruth played his last game, he’s still in the top-10 of many offensive categories. He’s 8th in batting average; 3rdin homers; 4th in runs scored; and 6th in RBI’s. Think what his stats would have been had he not pitched the first six years of his career, in which he won 94 games and maintained a respectable 2.28 earned run average. 

Babe’s highest salary was the $80,000 paid in 1930. That would equal to about $1,474,000 in today’s dollars. That’s just about exactly what somebody named Trayce Thompson, a center fielder on the White Sox that nobody ever heard of, was paid, on par with the Babe’s best salary. Pathetically, 470 major leaguers made more money in 2023 than the Babe did in his career. A total of  818 players received a paycheck from MLB in 2023, putting arguably the greatest player to ever play baseball, Ruth, right in the middle of today’s salaries. 

Clearly there is something wrong with these escalating salaries and we sport fans are the primary cause. Not victim, but cause. We keep paying for outrageously expensive tickets that have enough surcharges and extra fees tacked on that would make an IRS agent blush. The average ticket price for a game is $37, up ten bucks from ten years ago, although this does not reflect the higher cost if one goes through any of the unscrupulous ticket agencies. 

One ticket, one beer, and one hot dog for a Cubs game will cost you $99.98, second most expensive in the country behind the Chicago White Sox who top the list at $100.78. Both Chicago teams, long on putting out inferior products, charge the most in the country. Heck it only costs New Yawkers $49 for a Yankees game, usually a much better product. The Minnesota Twins are the cheapest park to go to as you will pay only $39 to watch Correa get paid $222,222. PER GAME to not hit. 

And yet average attendance per game is on the rise ever since Anthony Fauci convinced us we should all stay home with a rag on our face while he attended Washington National’s games virtually by himself. Average attendance was up around 8,000 people per game league-wide last year, up 42%. That equates to 648,000 more people per year per stadium, or another $64 million in the pocket of the Cubs Rickets family or the Sox’s Jerry Reinsdorf. 

A replica Bellinger Cub’s jersey sells for $75 – $165. A simple blue Cubs ball cap is $38. It will cost you up to $50 to park your car in a tight spot that is sure to get your doors dinged up. 

The point, folks, until we stop paying those exorbitant prices for everything, and stop going to the games, nothing will change. The Yankees collectively owe three players over a billion dollars. How long will it be until we see the first billion-dollar player, courtesy of our own ignorance. 

We need to stop supporting this insanity.