Baseball season is in full swing now and it has been interesting watching players who move from a team they have been with since their career started and get themselves established with a new fan base and surroundings. If you watch TV very much you are probably familiar with an insurance company that promotes what they call the “name your price tool”. It turns out, there is a name your price tool for free agent ballplayers too. His name is Scott Boras, and he is one of the super agents who always tries to get his players signed to the most lucrative contracts in the major leagues. He must be a movie buff like me, because one of the overriding themes of his approach to signing his clients is “A Fist Full of Dollars”, or, for his key players, it might be “For a Few Dollars More”, as in, he looks at the highest dollar contract out there and tries to get his guy signed for just over that figure. He accomplished that recently when Bryce Harper signed with the Philadelphia Phillies for $330,000,000, which edged out Giancarlo Stanton who signed a $325,000,000 deal with the Yankees a year or so ago. It is going to take Harper 13 long years to collect all of this salary though, so, on a per year basis, he has a ways to go. Presumably, Harper can make up some ground by doing endorsements for hair styling products.
I have a friend, Abner Mality (not this person’s real name, but it probably should be), who likes to whine about things he sees as unfair, a big one being how guys who make their living playing a game should get paid more that the Gross National Product of a small country. He opined about how it should be possible for constituencies who make a combined annual salary equal to the total value of the contract could have some ability to veto the deal. I wasn’t sure where he was going with this, so I pressed a bit. He said, “What if a group of teachers or firefighters, you know, real worthwhile people, could somehow weigh in on these deals, and if they didn’t find the player worthy of it, they could pull the plug?” I did some quick calculations and figured out that by that standard, a contract like Harper’s could be nullified by about 5,590 teachers, 6,240 firefighters, 330,000,000 bloggers, or 17 congress persons. NOTE: with the congress persons, I am not going only by their base congressional salary, but I am also factoring in a percentage of all the graft and dark money they take in. Okay, so make that 12 congress persons.
Anyway, you get the idea. Pro sports are way more lucrative that back at the time I was growing up. I have to admit there was a certain appeal to the profession when I was going to high school. I didn’t have the opportunity to play organized sports much when I was in school, but I did manage to get in one season of Babe Ruth League ball. Unfortunately, it turned out that I suffered from a condition known as LOFT (Lack of Flippin’ Talent) so that is about as far as my sports career went.
One thing that contributed to the misery of that summer playing ball was the assistant coach of my team, Nat Zass (not his real name but the letters in his real name could be rearranged to spell “I go pluck headgear). He was kind of hyper and driven to win, no doubt because his day-time job was sanitation engineer, as in garbage man. So, I guess he really needed to win at something. . I can vividly remember a heated exchange of words between him and another player on the team (remember the team was made up of kids aged 12-15) and they were basically telling each other what to go do with himself. Our team did take the city championship that year, but I wasn’t there to see it. By that time I had decided to try something less stressful, like dismantling pipe bombs or jumping a motorcycle over a snake pit.
I recently saw a video clip on Fox News where a Little League baseball coach was telling the team that you are either a winner or a loser, and if their dad told them that the important thing is just to play the game for fun that he is a loser. I’m kind of wondering if that is a good message to be sending to kids that age. Of course you can’t win every time, but if you don’t win at all, maybe it means you should find something else to do that you can win at. Certainly, no one likes to lose, and if you find a way to get comfortable with losing the you are going to lose a lot, because the simple truth is that it’s easier to lose than to win.
So, is there value in losing if it teaches you to handle it with grace and dignity and promotes sportsmanship, or do we have our kids grow up to believe that second place is the first loser, period the end? Let me know want you think.
