Quote:
Originally Posted by Boreas
Also, I'm with Pat on this. The money these guys make is obscene, players and owners. Hell, I remember Al Kaline, one of the best baseball players ever, used to have to have an off-season in his home town (Baltimore) working behind the counter at a sporting goods store.
When I was watching the World Series games this year in Detroit it suddenly dawned on me that there were essentially no black faces in the crowd. I mean, this is DETROIT, man! No black people in the crowd? What's up with that? Well, what's up with it is that, being poor, most black Detroiters can't afford the price of a ticket. Provably can't afford to go to that many regular season games either.
There needs to be some sort of happy medium between the situation in professional sports today and the way it was in Kaline's day. These guys shouldn't have to have off-season jobs but if they weren't paid in multiples of millions the ticket prices wouldn't have to be out of reach for the majority of fans.
John
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Trust me, a lot of white Detroiters - including yours truly - couldn't afford the tickets either. And that's not exclusive to the World Series. For a family to go to a regular season game complete with tickets and parking is a serious financial undertaking, not to mention adding in a hot dog and a soft drink.
Baseball players today aren't bench-marking their income against players of yesteryear. They're bench-marking themselves against top tier entertainers, who also are paid in many cases millions per year for their efforts. By comparison, I can also say that it's a relatively rare occasion that we'll venture out to a movie - and its usually a matinee - because the cost of a movie ticket has also sky-rocketed.