Posted on 09/26/2009 7:53:07 AM PDT by jilliane
The league MINIMUM is $400,000 this year. He makes more this year than the average family of four makes in 9 - 10 years.
>>I’m all for equality.
You’re a good communist. Congrats on that!
But, if you believed in real freedom, you’d be able to see that a guy that is holding a one-of-a-kind object that is valuable to another guy should NOT be expected to just give it away because people that DON’T have the one-of-a-kind object think the should. Obama would be proud of your generosity when it comes to other people’s things!
(Now with that said, I have learned that the ballplayer in question is a minor leaguer that probably makes less than the fan, so they really should come to some kind of agreement.)
I know about minor league. They don’t make a ton of money, but most are in their late teens and early twenties and make more than the average “working man” wage. Plus, they’re playing baseball.
Last i heard, league minimum was $333,000. So that’s just over $2000 a game. I may be corrected by someone wiser than I, but that first figure is a couple years old.
I don’t understand how just because you catch a ball in the stands it makes it your ball. Seems to me it’s still the property of MLB. It’s nice that they let people keep them but I don’t understand why they have to let them keep them.
This guy sounds like all the non-fans who attened the first couple years of baseball when PacBell Park first opened. They bought out all the tickets, not because they loved the game, but because it was "the place" to be seen. Didn't have much of a clue about the game but hey - they were there.
There is nothing more annoying (to me) than going to watch a baseball game and having the people in your section getting up and down, up and down (beer, food, beer, bathroom, more beer), walking in front of you (excuse me, excuse me)and yapping on their cell phones rather than watching the game.
bare?
That says it all! None could say it better!
That’s the minimum for Major Leagues. It’s far, far less for Minor Leagues (AAA, AA, A, etc). A player signed to a AAA minor league contract makes minimum of $2,150 for the first year, and after that no less than $2,150.
Other rules regarding minor leaguers who get called up to the Major Leagues are more complicated. A player with less than 6 years of major league service time who is not signed to a multi-year contract is defined as a “protected player”. If a player has less than 3 full years of service (One year of service time is defined as 172 days on the active 25 man roster, or the 15-60 DL) he’ll earn at least the MLB minimum of $400,000, or $65,000 if he has spent at least 1 day of service or 2 years on the 40 man roster. Alot of prospects have split contracts which will pay them different salaries in the minors and the majors.
I got this from various sources on the web, including the Major League Baseball Players Association as well the Minor League Baseball web site.
http://www.mlb.com/pa/pdf/cba_english.pdf
So, if this kid had a minor league contract and is playing in the bigs because he got called up to fill in for an injured player, he’s not making anywhere near the league minimum.
It’s not all doom and gloom for minor leaguers. Some get huge signing bonuses when they are drafted, sometimes in the millions of $$$.
I have no proiblem if the player tells him to eat it.
Per month?
Per month. WHich means there are umps making more
http://www.minorleaguebaseball.com/milb/info/umpires.jsp?mc=_ump_salaries
That’s for full time in the league players. He isn’t a full time in the league players. He just got called up from the minors, where guys generally make $40 or $50 thousand. Now for his games up in the bigs he’ll get a nice paycheck, league minimum equivalent but in game checks (so 400 grand divided by 162 x number of games).
He’s 28 and still in the minors.
That’s the tradition in baseball and hockey, once it enters the fan area it belongs to the fan that gets it. In football and basketball you generally give it back. If the MLB tried to seize it back they’d be bucking a century of tradition and would get tons of bad press.
Exactly. A real fan once they heard over the PA that this was the guys first career home would flag event staff and ask for a team official to give the ball back.
Yeah I hate people who have to walk around during the game. Especially in baseball, with all those mid-inning and between inning breaks it’s not that tough to get your food and beer without interrupting the action.
He should have turned it over to Carson and said congratulations.......
A bunch of years ago a friend of mine was on a business trip in California and took in a ball game. He was seated at the left field wall in fair territory when Moises Alou hit a ground rule double which bounced over the wall right into my friend's lap.
Ironically enough, the team was staying at my friend's hotel so Ted took the ball down to the desk clerk and asked him to ask Alou to sign it when he came back to the hotel.
About 11:00 that night there was a knock on Ted's door and it was Alou personally returning the signed baseball. He then stayed for about an hour talking with my buddy over a beer about baseball and his dad, Felipe Alou........pretty cool.
Not sure what "era" you grew up in. I saw my first major league game in 1951 and went to games pretty regularly until the mid-70s when I sometimes did work for a couple of the teams.
I never got a game ball. It took me a very long time before I got a batting practice ball, and even that was tainted. (I was working up in the Montreal Olympic Stadium, walking from one place to another. There was hardly anyone there. Some guy hit a ball into the section I was passing. I just calmly walked over and picked the ball up. I still have it.) Back when I took my kids to a few games I even wondered if I had been able to snag a ball whether I would have given it to one of them. (Probably not! I would have justified this as preventing the unhappiness of the one who didn't get the ball!) The thought of giving up such a prize to some stranger whose parents were wearing diapers when I was in high school and who might be playing in the Minors in two months is quite difficult to comprehend.
ML/NJ
People used to get to keep footballs the went into the stands. There were some injuries from fights for the balls and teams got sued by enterprising lawyers. This resulted in the rule in place for quite some time that you had to return the ball to the field. Now they have the big nets behind the goalposts to keep the balls from going into the stands, so about the only time a ball goes into the stands is when some player throws one in (penalty) or presents the ball to a kid in the front for (no penalty, SFAIK).
ML/NJ
I guess we have sarcasm tags for a reason but I actually thought one wasn’t needed.
I really don’t care that the person who caught it wants money for it, but thinking that is fine because the player might make big bucks or thinking that it isn’t fine because he doesn’t make big bucks is just insane.
It would be an act of courtesy and selflessness to return the ball w/o compensation but it isn’t compulsory, it doesn’t matter if the player is filthy rich or up from the minors.
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