SPEAKING OF SPORTS
December 1999
by Barry Stagg
Greedy professional baseball players are leading the way this Christmas season in making ridiculous and outrageous claims to inflated salaries. With the World Series barely over for two weeks at the writing of this column, it is apparent that the sporting euphoria of the baseball season that peaked during the World Series has been replaced by the heavy and negative aura of greedy, young baseball players and their agents wanting impossibly high salaries.
In Toronto, the most outrageous examples are those two homebred babies, Carlos Delgado and Shawn Green. These are two fellows who have succeeded in winning nothing and have stood by running up impressive personal statistics while their team, the Toronto Blue Jays has collapsed during every season in which they have been leading the team. In these circumstances they both, of course, are refusing to sign contracts with the Blue Jays even when offered salaries that amount to about $10 million a year over five years. They should and are being ridiculed in the Toronto sporting press but even their patently selfish action pale in comparison to the excruciatingly self-absorbed actions of Seattle's Ken Griffey.
Griffey has been offered a contract which totals somewhere in the vicinity of $130 million in U.S. funds. As far as I can figure from various reports his salary would be in the vicinity of $17 to $18 million dollars per year. Despite this offer, which has been placed madepublic by his team, the Seattle Mariners, he has indicated that he must be traded from Seattle because he wishes to spend more time at home with his family who live, conveniently, in Florida.
Some of the Seattle sports writers have mentioned to Mr. Griffey in print that if he had been so concerned about spending time with his family then maybe he ought not to have moved them from Seattle to Florida several years ago. One particularly brazen sports reporter even suggested that Griffey might quit baseball altogether if being home in front of his trophy case with his family 100% of the time is paramount in his thoughts.
Obviously, the suggestion, which is never far from the surface here, is that Mr. Griffey is looking to be traded or to become a free agent not because of any super enhanced sense of paternity but rather because he wants to make even more money then the already obscene salary of $17 million dollars a year offered to him by his present team.
Certainly, many fans are wishing a plague of economic devastation upon professional sports in general. The baseball examples are just the most obvious and irritating examples of how baseball and its counterparts are destroying the enjoyment of sports for fans everywhere.
There seems to be very little Christmas spirit in any of these athletes and the various hangers-on who profit from their obscene claims to compensation. Perhaps the ghost of Christmas past has a Dickensian role to play in the dreams of these fickle and pampered creatures.
Until next month, next year: Be proud, be prosperous.