Posted on 09/08/2015 12:29:34 PM PDT by Hebrews 11:6
After the 1965 season Sandy Koufax, the best baseball pitcher on the planet, held out for a higher salary from his employer, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Koufax had won the Cy Young Award, given to the league’s best pitcher, two of the past three years, would have won it the third but for an injury, and had led the Dodgers to two World Championships in those three years. Thanks largely to his efforts, the Dodgers’ owners were profiting handsomely, but they were paying poorly. In Koufax’s holdout he teamed up, for increased leverage, with Don Drysdale, the Dodgers’ other dominating pitcher and former Cy Young winner. They were each demanding $167,000 for the 1966 season. After protracted and very public negotiations, they settled for $110,000 for Don and $125,000 for Sandy. (Koufax would win his third Cy Young that summer, as he and Drysdale helped pitch the Dodgers into yet another World Series.)
Fifty years later, the Dodgers’ current best-pitcher-on-the-planet, 27-year-old Clayton Kershaw, already with three Cy Youngs plus an MVP and counting, has a contract that pays him $32,500,000 ($32.5 MILLION) per year, or 260 times Koufax’s salary. What exactly happened to permit such a huge escalation in salaries, far beyond inflation?
What Koufax was fighting was baseball’s “Reserve Clause.” Every player’s contract had this clause, which stipulated that if the team and player were unable to agree on a contract for the coming season, the club could simply renew the previous year’s contract “for one year,” and there was absolutely nothing the player could do about it. In fact, all the clubs could and did do that repeatedly, for one year and then another and another, and the courts had upheld it. Sandy Koufax was prohibited by the contract he had signed from selling his services to the highest bidder. So his only real leverage was to refuse to pitch at all and earn zero—not a real alternative. For him and every player it was baseball slavery, equivalent to making bricks for Pharaoh.
That Reserve Clause had been in effect for decades and would remain in place for one more decade, until finally another Dodger pitcher, Andy Messersmith, managed to get it before an impartial arbitrator. When this arbitrator received the case, he immediately realized what a sham that Clause had always been: the contract’s actual language allowed the club to renew the contract only “for one year,” not one year plus another and still another and another, year-after-year-after-year. So, he immediately ruled in Messersmith’s favor, invalidating this improper use of the Reserve Clause and declaring Andy to be a Free Agent able to offer his services to the highest bidder—as were all players going forward. And today Clayton Kershaw’s agent has tested the open marketplace and determined that his services as a starting pitcher are worth upwards of $30 million annually. Clayton has earned it, and the Dodgers pay it quite willingly.
Why then, knowing this, should we Praise the Lord?
First, our Lord will not ever misinterpret his contract with us in order to benefit Himself at our expense. His holy character would neither desire it nor permit it. There are no Reserve Clauses in His contract with us. He deals fairly with us, and He always will. We have Jesus acting as our Arbitrator and Agent to ensure our fair treatment.
Second, our Lord will not ever deprive us of what we are worth, as the Dodgers were doing to Sandy Koufax. Indeed, in His eyes, the only worth we have is that He made us, because we cannot win 25 games for Him—He doesn’t need anything we have, for in our natural state we can’t do anything for Him at all. In fact, in our natural state every pitch we throw gets blasted far up into the bleachers. No Cy Young Awards for us! So He remedied that lack by giving us value, by providing His Son’s righteousness to each of us, while Jesus acted as our very partial Arbitrator and set us free by paying for our unrighteousness on the Cross. Now our Lord sees us as having infinite value, and He will treat us that way for all 9 innings, for all 162 games plus the playoffs, season-after-season-after-season, for all eternity. We’re in His Hall of Fame now.
That’s our new contract and it’s iron-clad, with not a single Reserve Clause to be found anywhere, not even in the fine print. Now, we’re worth more to Him than even Clayton Kershaw is worth to the Dodgers. Praise our Lord!
Exorbitant player salaries have DESTROYED sports.
Baseball Parable
It’s called capitalism. They are getting what the market will bear.
I don’t know if it is relative, but I believe Koufax was Jewish.
I agree. If the salaries get to high, ticket prices will too, and eventually adjustments will be made by falling attendance, which will then result in lower salaries.
Nice. The Dodgers’ franchise may pay young Mr. Kershaw $32 million, but not one of them would die to save his soul.
Kershaw is 12-6.
That’s the parable of the big market, but not-so-good team hype.
Preach it, Sister!
I’d say it is relevant and had to force myself not to mention it; moreover, Kershaw is a very energetic Christian. So, we have the Jew laboring under the Reserve Clause (Law), while the Christan has been set free (Grace).
To the best of my knowledge, nobody every won 3 Cy Youngs when the award signified the recipient was the best pitcher in both leagues.
MHO: Koufax was the greatest pitcher of all time. When he was on, which was often, he was unhittable.
But he did serve up an inside the park home run.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVm-HwAkVp8
The distorting factor is that the team owners are still crony capitalists and get politicians to allow fat cats to deduct tickets as business expenses. So, real fans have been pretty much priced out of stadiums.
Still, the reserve clause was criminal. When Koufax & Drysdale were holding out the minimum salary for MLB was $5,000. The team bus drivers made more than that.
My favorite baseball trivia question is also my favorite economics lesson:
For much of the 1930s through the end of WWII, who was the highest paid baseball player?
Satchell Paige
He operated in a somewhat free market.
Curt Flood and Marvin Miller should be in the Hall of Fame.
I still have my ticket stub from "the Sandberg Game," Cubs/Cardinals, Wrigley Field, June 23, 1984. The admission price on the ticket is $6.00. Last year I sat one section over in Wrigley, and the ticket price was $60.00, exactly a ten fold increase. The prices have definitely gone up in 30 years.
And yes, the "Sandberg Game" ticket is autographed by Ryno; best baseball game I will ever see.
Also for the record, are you aware of the point of this little parable?
Being a Texan, I could counter the same about Nolan Ryan. Both own records that will never be broken.
I am old enough to remember Koufax pitching, and he did have the greatest curve in MLB history, with no one even close.
Koufax stirred some controversy by declining to pitch Game 1 of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. He still led the Dodgers to another World Series win. He was the Series MVP and was named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year.
Johnny Roseboro: “Feet, don’t fail me now!”
In the Parable of the Talents, the king says to the servants who have successfully invested, “You have been faithful in a very little.” That gives us an idea what He thinks of money.
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