Ted McClelland, an author who's a Michigan native and former Lansing State Journal reporter, calls himself "a Tigers fan since I was 11." That doesn't mean he likes Justin Verlander's new contract, as he goes on to write in a Slate article.
There is a point at which my lifelong love of the Tigers, and of Major League Baseball, collides with my equally strong loathing of economic inequality. And that point is $25.7 million a year. . . .
In the first year of his new contract, Verlander will earn $20 million — around 800 times as much as Detroit’s median household income.
Income gaps are top-of-mind for 46-year-old McClelland, who was raised in Lansing and now lives in Chicago, because it's part of what he examines in a book about the Rust Belt coming out May 21 in hard cover. It's titled "Nothin' But Blue Skies" and subtitled "The Heyday, Hard Times and Hopes of America's Industrial Heartland."
Here's how he frames the baseball connection in Slate:
Ted McClellandOver the past 40 years . . . Americans' incomes have not grown at all, in real dollars. But baseball players’ incomes have increased twentyfold in real dollars: The average major-league salary in 2012 was $3,213,479.
The income gap between ballplayers and their fans closely resembles the rising gap between CEOs and their employees, which grew during the same period from roughly 25-to-1 to 380-to-1. . . .
I’m singling out professional athletes for my class envy because they’re the highest-profile beneficiaries of changes that have enriched those at the top of the economic order while impoverishing those at the bottom. . . .
The deregulation of the American economy that began in the 1970s has increased the salaries of professional athletes enormously while reducing those of blue-collar workers.
All of this makes it tough to root for his once-beloved sport, says the writer who recalls that he "filled scrapbooks with stories about Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker clipped from the Detroit Free Press."
Since my past two jobs disappeared in the Great Recession, I can’t watch a professional sporting event without thinking, Most of those guys are set for life, while I’ve been buying my own health insurance for 5 1/2 years. . . . The market forces that have overvalued ballplayers’ skills while devaluing mine have made it impossible for me to just enjoy the damn game.
