You can't put a price tag on love but sports has no issue slapping one on talent.
Mike Trout is arguably the best player in Major League Baseball. No, he doesn't have a World Series ring but that can be said about a lot of talented players both past and present. Many a guy who hit a career. .230 has a title on his resume. The ring thing is a tried and true sports talk radio topic but its illogical.
A saber-metric geek at The Athletic parses Trout's numbers in the wake of the mega-deal he inked this week, the one that makes him the highest paid North American athlete ever, at least until Boston's Mookie Betts gets his turn at the trough. Sparing you the stats, Writer Jonah Keri deems the Angels outfielder “a modern-day Willie Mays“, describing both as “transcendent hitters“ and “devastating baserunners.“ Keri says that if you pick any metric that isn't WAR, “Trout is carving the same path once forged by one of the three greatest players of all time“ and “the best player of his era since his rookie season.“
So how do his employers pay the freight? Baseball may no longer be “America's pastime“ but it remains a damned profitable enterprise for the 30 old men who own MLB teams, including Angels owner Arte Moreno. Keri reminds us he bought the team for $184 mil in 2003. That value swelled to over a half billion just six years later, the math coming from Forbes magazine. Now, the publication says the franchise is worth TEN TIMES Moreno's original bill. Keri figures if he sold today with Trout under contract, the team could garner two billion dollars.
Moreno does business in a giant media market that has a local TV deal paying $3 billion over 20 years. Add to that pile the cash the Angels get from shared licensing and merchandising deals. Then there's the windfall that came when MLB sold its Advanced Media operation to Disney which gave each team including Moreno's another $60 million.
While their books aren't open to public scrutiny, Keri figures every club owner is raking in tens of millions in profits annually, money he says is better spent on talent like Trout instead of sitting in an old rich guy's bank account. That was the argument made off-season by those bemoaning the lack of free-agent signings, the claim being that teams “didn't want to win.“
Keri says Trout is a highly skilled player in a for-profit enterprise that relies on guys like him to stay in business. Folks like he and freshly signed Bryce Harper are reaping the rewards while those of us who love to watch them keep ponying up at the turnstiles or by buying MLB cable packages that allow us to watch their exploits on a nightly basis, all while swaddled in our favorite team's garb. We're feeding this beast, folks, so we can't have it both ways.
Keri's co-worker Jayson Stark asks what the signing means for the game moving forward: the short answer is that it just made the aforementioned Mr. Betts a kadzillionaire in waiting. Stark says other talents will also cash out because, as he puts it: Stars. Get. Paid. Keri's already shown us above that there's money for mega-talent. Mid-range players? Other team employees? Players in minor league systems? Not so much, because no one pays big bucks to see them. That's a cold, hard fact. Stark quotes one player who says, “We've now got a sport where 10 per cent of the players are making 90 per cent of the money. And nobody talks about that.“ What will baseball's middle class do about that?
That, fans, is a $430 million dollar question. Is baseball doing fabulously? If you're an owner or a supremely talented player, it would seem the answer is yes. In terms of popularity when measured against other sports, or when it comes to paying the other 24 guys on rosters, maybe not. Same for teams, Stark says, in what he deems the game's shrinking middle class even though it's clubs like the Padres, Phillies and Rockies backing up the proverbial truck this time around and not the usual suspects who wear pinstripes in New York.
Bottom line? One front office type tells Stark the players union will ask for change to help middle-ground players while clubs will demand more revenue sharing so they can compete while the rich teams will push back against all of it. “Combustible,“ is the adjective that source uses. “Strike“ is a word that comes to mind as well, and that's not good for anyone.
The game has three seasons to avoid all that.Â
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