Sports Salaries
Most people in America feel that pro athlete's salaries are too high. Current sports salaries are reaching astronomical figures. Players are signing 50 million-dollar contracts and up just because they happen to be pretty good at hitting a baseball. Just the other day Kevin Brown signed a contract worth over 100 million! Now pro sports are fun to watch and follow, but college games entertain just as well and they aren't receiving a legal penny. Down south, people like college sports more than professional sports. Player's don't Ned to be paid exorbitant amounts of money. The economics involved in sports today hurts the fans, some teams, and the leagues themselves. The sports leagues can actually be hurt by there own actions. The current NBA lockout is a prime example of money ruining what looked to be a fine year. The owners are locking out the players until they can settle on a bunch of points. The baseball strike a few years back obviously hurt baseball, and this lockout might hurt basketball also. John Donovan from CNN/SI summed it up perfectly, "You have greedy owners and you have greedy players, all of them fighting over absurd amounts of money. And, in the end, it's the fans who get sc
Baseball has the highest salaries out of all the sports. With the average salary at about 1,000,000 it's hard to think of any player as poor. And the salaries are growing very rapidly. In 1981 the average income was $185,000. Compared to the "real world" baseball players are totally in a league of their own. "In 1976 the average ball player earned eight times the US average income. In 1991 the average ballplayer earned forty-seven times the average US income" (Zimbalist ?). Salaries really have lost every sense of reason. If you wanted to look at the other side of the coin, baseball players do make considerably less than their entertainment counterparts. On the field money is just a fraction of what some players get. In 1996 Michael Jordan made 12.6 million dollars. But since image is everything he made $40 million just in endorsements in one year! All because some companies believe his face will help them sell their product. Sports athletes are hot commodities. Everywhere you look there is a sports related endorsement. Some companies rely solely on sports figures to advertise even if their product has nothing to do with sports (Wheatees, Campbell Soup). The way sports are set up today money is a huge part of how successful the team is. It has often been said that you can buy yourself a World Series Championship and to a certain extent it is true. A couple years ago the Florida Marlins bought many high priced players, putting them at the top of the salary list. They won the World Series that year and then totall
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Approximate Word count = 1040
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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