Just prior to the pandemic that forced us to shut down, stay socially distant, and lose two years of our lives, I met a passionate baseball fan in the middle of a snow storm in Saratoga Springs, New York. I talked to this amazing guy and his dad at a wine tasting my friend and I decided to stop for after we snowshoed through Saratoga State Park. We talked with Josh and his dad, Ted, for some time about baseball but it wasn't until later in the evening that we learned that they were the founders and owners of the Thirsty Owl Winery on Cayuga Lake, NY and their Bistro in Saratoga Springs.
Their knowledge of the baseball was extraordinary just like their approach to wine I might add. After we met up, Josh asked to ghost write a piece for BYB and he did just that in EARPIECES, GET-OVER-IT-ISM & GERRIT RELATABILITY: A GUIDE TO LOVING BASEBALL IN 2020. Fast forward to 2022, Josh Cupp is back at it—fired up by the recent events that MLB put us all through over the last 100 days. I hope you get as much or maybe more from Josh's wise words below. Josh, I appreciate your passion for baseball and sharing some of that with all of us here at BYB.
“I am genuinely thrilled to say Major League Baseball is back and we’re going to play 162 games, “commissioner Rob Manfred said. “I want to start by apologizing to our fans. I know the last few months have been difficult.”
"With that news/quote at 3:26pm on Thursday we are all meant to be relieved we are ready to start loving MLB again like nothing happened. Manfred’s obligatory apology is the ultimate smokescreen. My plea is don’t let it be. Love the game. Love the smells of the ballpark. Love or hate that the “ball got by Buckner!” Love the feelings the game has evoked in your life. Resolution today or a continued lockout was irrelevant to me—my relationship with baseball is as strong as ever. I’m slated to coach my kid’s Little League team in just a couple weeks. My connection with MLB is fractured. I want to share how I got here. I have unconditional love for baseball, just not MLB.
Throw the ball, catch the ball, hit the ball. I’m all in there with the basic fundamentals. Add to it all the numbers, stats, the quantitative measurements of performance and achievement and I am mesmerized. A triple slash line of BA/OBP/SLG, you can measure how much value a position player has instantly. Defining value, achievement, and worth. Yes, please. Wouldn’t it be amazing to measure an elected politician that way, or a significant other? I digress. Stats fuel value for a ball player, their financial worth. Everyone knows that. I’m good with that, it’s just that the baseline has changed. Salaries, even with the adjustment of inflation, have grown so massively, net revenue for owners is embarrassingly high and we’ve lost our way. It’s all changed subtly over time, and TV stole the relatability of the game and it won’t give it back. The consumer is the only one with the power to take it back.
Check out these indisputable bits of quantitative measure and be your own judge.
1. I believe Babe Ruth’s best season was 1918 when he was still a member of the Red Sox. He hit .300/.411/.555 and also won 13 games, and posted a 2.22 ERA in 166 innings of work. How amazing is that considering 2021 AL MVP Shohei Ohtani posted .257/.372/.592 with the bat and a 3.18 ERA in 22% fewer innings. The Babe raked in $7K in 1918 for his efforts, $135K in 2022 money adjusted for inflation, or 4.8 times more than the average annual salary ($1,518) of the folks that rushed into Fenway Park to watch the 23 year old play. His largest salary was $80K (the largest in the game at the time) in 1930 and even that sizable sum was 57 times greater than the average patron at the ballpark. $80K in 2022 is less than $1.4M. In 1930 the average ticket for admission to Yankee Stadium was $1.10, or $17.75 in 2022 money.
2. Let’s fast forward. 2021’s highest paid MLBer was Max Scherzer at $43.3M. The average earner of the estimated 50 million MLB fans is $52K. Max earned 850 times the average annual salary of the fans attending his games. Is everyone ok with that? The AVERAGE MLB salary is $4.2M or 80 times that $52K mark. I can’t throw a baseball 99 MPH but I can open a bottle of wine in 4.8 seconds (I had some training, my family runs a winery in upstate NY). They’re both pretty arbitrary skill sets, I wish mine paid more. Comedic break is over. Ready to become deeply offended?
3. The average minor league player earns about $15K annually. Not a typo. Are we still ok with that? If you are, you’re an ass***. The cost for a major league team to pay EVERYone of its players the nation’s average annual salary of $52K? Under $6M USD. The Yankee franchise is currently valued at just a smidge under $7B USD. Even John Sherman and Stuart Sternberg (owners of the Royals and Rays respectively) can find $6M in between the cushions of their Peugeot's Onyx Sofa. Question: Over the last few months did the owners or players seek to repeal the 1922 Supreme Court decision to grant MLB an exemption to the Sherman Antitrust Act which allows MLB team owners to pay such shocking wages to its farm hands. Nope, no they didn’t. MLB is the only one of the four major sports in our country that enjoys this exemption.
4. There are approximately 900 humans that constitute the total number of MLB players, owners and high ranking executives. Fan base just stateside alone is 70-100M+. Figure it out. Do you love baseball or does it have to be MLB? My son, Ceko, and I attended a Tri City ValleyCats game not too far back and we watched a travel sized Cuban named Franny Cobos warm up in a game he started. While concentrating intently on his craft, Franny still saw my kid was studying his set and delivery trying to pick up even the smallest hint on how to improve his own game. After the session Franny asked Ceko’s name and signed a ball and tossed it to him. Franny then tossed Ceko a ball and asked for HIS autograph. Talk about easy to root for. After researching this article, I would guess that Franny made about $8k that season.
Suzie Pinstripe is going to kill me if I don’t button this up sooner than later. I’m not meant to write some op-ed piece and tell anyone reading this how to manage their baseball addiction. I will happily explain my relationship with the best game in the world. Baseball will be my true love always, the GAME of baseball. If I could be so lucky in forty years to have my final thoughts and memories be warming Ceko up before a Little League game. My relationship with MLB, well, that’s more complicated. It will always ebb and flow. A decline and rebirth. I’m currently in a sharp decline.
Like the lover you swore off, it was too complicated. Maybe the complexity is part of the attraction. If you can’t take care of those that buy your product, you don’t deserve our affection. I can make that decision to support the game in another way. The minor leaguers can’t. They are in love with the game the owners THINK they own and the owners aren’t loving them back. Fix that. Make this game relatable again. The kids and the folks that bring them to a game should revere the players for their hustle, immense skill and love for the game, not be in awe of the type of car they drove to the ballpark. The game should remind us of what was once good and could be again. Instead it is mirroring the deep divide between that upper less than 1% and the rest of us. "
--Suzie Pinstripe
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