Is it your business?

seriously?

 

If the league has a salary cap, it's absolutely a story how much a guy is making.

 

Moddy - I would think the main factor in whether or not baseball tickets are good value is the quality of entertainment you'll receive, not how much is going to the players. When I've bought tickets, I've never once considered the payrolls of the teams playing. Maybe I'm different from most though.

 

Personally, I don't care.

In the abstract sense, almost all professional sports franchises operate in facilities completely, predominantly or substantially financed by tax dollars.

Invariably the use of tax dollars to finance the playing facility is sold to the local governing bodies on the basis that a brand-new facility will allow the franchise to "improve its revenue flow" and be "more competitive in the talent market" and presumably better on the field, so citizens/taxpayers certainly do have an interest in seeing how this money is being spent (i.e. are they actually using the 'revenue' to acquire players or are they just sticking it in their pockets?).

Any pro sports franchise operating in an arena financed in any significant amount by tax money should be forced by law to release complete accounting reports every single year. (Good luck on that.)

There are exceptions, a few. The Detroit Pistons built their arena with essentially no public money, but they operate in a salary-cap league so salaries will become public anyway. I believe the Red Sox own Fenway lock stock and barrel, but MLB salaries come out through the MLBPA.

 

Yes, but there are some owners that I think take advantage of fans -- go cheap on the payroll knowing that they'll sell at least 50,000 seats and make money.

They don't even try to win. If you aren't trying to be competitive, I think the fans have a right to know.

Kind of like Col. Tom Parker and all those bad Elvis movies. Parker knew they could make a movies with his boy for $100,000 or whatever all day long and make money guaranteed.

You spend $5 mil or $10 mil to try to make a good movie and maybe Elvis is hailed as a real movie star. But you also might lose a few bucks. Better not risk that.

 

The difference in athletes vs. public/govt. employees is this: People are required to pay the salaries of p/g. People can choose not to pay the salaries of the athletes. To me, that's the salient point in this debate. Because you have no choice but to pay government employees' salaries, you have the right to know how much they make. While it is certainly newsworthy, I don't think you have the right to know how much an athlete makes. He's an employee of a private company. If that company receives public money, you have a right to know what it's being used for, even if part of the gov't money goes for salaries. But how much of that goes to which individual employee, I think, should remain between the company and the employee.

 

OK. Let's agree that you don't have the right to know how much an athlete makes.

But you find out anyhow. Maybe the agent calls all excited because he negotiated a $60 million contract.

Do you put it in the paper?

Of course you do.

So whether you have the "right" to the information or not is moot if you actually have the information.

 

I don't know that we have the right to know. Moddy gave a good example about his baseball tickets but many other factors go into it - like how much it costs to run a ballpark and pay a support staff.

The ushers and groundscrew factor into the cost of the ticket. Do you deserve to know what they make? Do you deserve to know what the electricity bill is at the stadium? I don't think so. (of course I don't really care either) None of my business.

 

Once again, almost all pro sports teams play in publicly-funded facilities. The money the franchises don't have to pay to build stadiums (or money they don't pay in rent in preposterous sweetheart lease agreements enjoyed by almost all teams) is money they can pay to players. Or stick in their pockets.

 

I don't think fans have a "right" to know how much athletes make, which is probably why team's don't release it (usually).

I think there is no question that fans want to know and that the information is significant and useful, more so than other private information like the athlete's address, ages of his children, wife's name, etc.

 

It does if your publisher is asking for public funds for a new $200 million building.

 

I think if we are talking about a salary cap, fans have a right to know how much a certain player is making in relation to that cap. If the cap is public the salaries have to be public. If they are not I think just knowing how much a player makes, as a percentage, is good enough. We don't have to know the actual numbers because it really isn't any of our business.