Tomorrow (April 8) is the Boston Red Sox Home Opener. Fenway Park will look clean and fresh and new corporate logos will have sprouted on available wall space over the winter like mushrooms. Happens ever year now. This is a very corporate-savvy, market-driven ownership group in Boston. Nothing wrong with that. Helps pays the bills. And the bills are gigantic.
The average major league salary this year rose above $3 million for the first time. The Yankees' Alex Rodriguez alone will make $28 million for the season. That's more than several teams' entire payrolls. (The major league minimum salary is $390,000.)Ted Williams, perhaps the greatest hitter ever to play the game, topped out at just over $100,000. A decade or so before he died, Williams was asked, considering the player salaries of today, how much he would ask for were he playing now with his record. "There isn't enough money," harumphed Teddy Ballgame.
Indeed, the stars of Williams' era, often considered baseball's golden age, played for mere fractions of what even today's mediocre players make. Players like Frank Robinson, Duke Snider, Whitey Ford and Harmon Killebrew. Each one is a Hall of Famer. Not one of them ever made a million dollars playing baseball. And yet, in a wonderful new book of interviews collected by former Baseball Commissioner Faye Vincent, the pure love of the game is echoed in tones of joy rarely heard from today's crop of ballplayer millionaires.
The book is called, "We Would Have Played For Nothing."
Word is the owners are at work on a companion volume tentatively titled, "Now You Tell Us!"
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