It’s time for baseball to cut everything in half, from tickets to player salaries

Sometime about 13 years ago, shortly after I started the View From the Cheap Seats, I wrote a column about my fanciful thoughts of how much better Major League Baseball would be if the powers that be simply cut everything in half.

Player salaries, parking, concessions, souvenirs. Everything should be cut in half to achieve the goal of cutting ticket prices and the cost of attending games by half.

Just think of how many more people could take their family to a baseball game and get back in touch with America’s Pastime. Something that, at a cost of an average of about $200 for a family of four to attend a single game, has become excruciatingly out of reach for the Average Joe.

Late last week, news came out that the agreement being hammered out between owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association gives clubs the authorization to put advertising on uniforms for the potential 2020 season. I know these are unusual times. But with the death struggle going on between billionaire owners and multi-millionaire players over how the golden goose will be divided and the bold-faced money grabs as American families try to contend with the worst economy since the depths of the great depression, the time to completely rethink sports economics may have finally come.

When games are played in front of fans again, likely not before 2021 at the soonest, I wouldn’t be surprised if people aren’t exactly clamoring for tickets. Not only will the coronavirus likely still be a factor, but so will joblessness, medical bills and an uncertain future. People aren’t likely to forget that when fans needed a distraction to give us some relief for our troubles, MLB players went on the record saying it wasn’t worth their while to play for a measly $7 million a year when they were supposed to get $25 million for a season of pitching or hitting a little ball.

If they want us to come back, make it worth our while. Baseball has priced itself out of its core market and now it’s paying the price. The indifference to whether a settlement is reached and games are played this year is deafening. So create some excitement by announcing that instead of $70 for a box seat ticket, next year those seats will be $35. A hot dog, instead of costing six bucks is still more expensive than it ought to be but at least semi-reasonable $3. Imagine how many more people would be included in the fun. Especially when the rollbacks include the upper reaches of the stadium where a $30 ticket becomes $15.

I know it’s going to be impossible to roll back the $300 million contracts that were passed out in recent years. But those days need to be over. It’s time for a salary cap in baseball. It’s something I’ve long resisted because I hate the National Football League scenario where players who want to stay with their team and teams that want to keep them are forced to go separate ways to make the books balance. But owners aren’t smart enough not to pay stupid prices for over the hill players. So there need to be rules in place -- not to protect owners from themselves, but to protect fans from owners third-of-a-billion-dollar whims.

There is simply no reason that a baseball player needs to make more than $10 million a year. But you could still give them $15 or $16 million and effectively cut the highest average salaries players are getting right now. If baseball used an NBA type salary cap, it could have the benefit of giving players’ original teams a chance to keep them for their whole career by allowing the club that has a players’ rights to offer more than free agent raiders. The trade off for players, while they would get less average dollars, is they could get longer deals that were still guaranteed. If a team could offer a player a maximum deal of $150 million for 10 years, owners would have less to lose in long term contracts. But players could get a lifetime of financial security earlier on.

Imagine budding St. Louis Cardinals star Jack Flaherty, who has a deep resentment of the arbitration system, being able to play out his first deal to hit the open market at 27 or so. Or to take a 10-year, $150-million deal from the Cardinals at age 25. Everybody wins — including the fans who too often are held hostage by the finances of the game, losing their favorite players to the highest bidder while they can do nothing but helplessly look on. Albert Pujols would have spent his whole career as a St. Louis Cardinal under those circumstances.

Baseball doesn’t need to NASCAR up its uniforms with a bunch of advertisements. It doesn’t need to artificially pump up the game with a bunch of stupid rule changes. It needs to make itself more accessible to the masses so future generations can develop their love of baseball the way it is supposed to be played. And what better time than now, in the middle on an unavoidable pause, to rethink the finances of the game?

Scott Wuerz

Belleville News-Democrat

Scott Wuerz has written “Cheap Seats,” a St. Louis Cardinals fan blog for the Belleville News-Democrat, since 2007. He is a former BND reporter who covered breaking news and education.