So I posted awhile back about Daisuke Matsuzaka and the almost mythical gyroball. Well, it looks like the Boston Red Sox won the bidding war at $51.1 million. 51 MILLION DOLLARS! The entire team salary for Wander's Colorado Rockies doesn't even add up to that amount of dough. I'm not sure what shocks me more--the obscene amount of dollars involved in this deal or the fact that George Steinbrenner actually got outbid.
To make this story even more astounding, if I understand this right, all that money goes back to his old team in Japan, the Seibu Lions. Why? Because that was just the cost to get the rights to talk to him, and negotiate a contract. This doesn't even include his actual salary, which is sure to be somewhere between stratospheric and low orbit. Heck, he's not even guaranteed to sign on to play Major League Baseball yet!
And you wonder why people think the money in professional sports has gotten just a wee bit insane. Maybe salary caps aren't such a bad thing. Then again, maybe this gyroball really is that cool.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
I think this Red Sox - Yankees rivalry is getting a bit out of hand...
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That's true, but sometimes it seems at the expense of the fans. Stadium ticket prices are obscenely high these days. Something the wife noticed when we went to our last game at Busch Stadium was the lack of any black fans in the crowd. Considering St. Louis is ~50% black, that seemed a bit odd. I guess you can interpret that a couple of ways: 1) Tickets are too expensive for the majority of black people in St. Louis to afford, or 2) Blacks just don't like baseball.
But this is a free market and you're right, sports are a lucrative business. But when teams can throw down that kind of money, and still have the gaul to ask their cities to help them fund a new stadium, I can understand some of the professional sports-haters out there.
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