Baseball and the Outrageous Salaries.

Baseball and boxing are tied for the highest paid sports (Mastroberardino, 2011). The total amount of money earned is about $238,536,500 (Mastroberardino, 2011). Yes that is in the billions, and yes it did take me three times to even read the number!!

The Yankees offered Cliff Lee, a free-agent pitcher, a deal which is worth up to $140 million that could be made over six years (Kercheval, 2010). He must have an arm of a God! Lee is only 32 years old and he is the most sought-after pitcher right now. The Yankees are not the only one after the amazing arm, others are too like the Rangers. Looking at his stats I could understand the reason many would not mind him being on their team, he has a 102-61 record and he also won the 2008 Cy Young Award as the American League's best picture (Kercheval, 2010). I mean $140 million though, even if he is the best pitcher in the game that is still a ridiculous amount of money to pay someone.

According to the ESPN website the average athlete gets paid $5,547,360. In the list of the best-paid athletes in 30 sports, Alex Rodriguez and Manny Pacquiao were the highest paid in 2011 with their salaries being $32,000,000 each (Mastroberardino, 2011). If that is not a eye opener then I do not know what one is.  It is absolutely ridiculous that America is in trillions among trillions of dollars in debt but it is OK to pay one person millions of dollars a year. It is just mind blowing to me, and unacceptable. 

If they are getting paid that much in one year, then I do not understand why they continue to work. Geez Louise, if you cannot live off of 32 million dollars for the rest of your life then I highly recommend you to reevaluate your budget. My whole family could live off of that, and when I say my whole family I mean everyone immediate and extended family members. There is no way you can spend that much money, so basically it is just money piling on top of each other that is probably not going to get spent, and if it does it is probably not on the best things that it could be used for. You sit there and think what you would do with that amount of money every year; I bet you could come up with quite a few things that the money could be used for. Of course that is too much money that one person makes, but if they are making that much money than they should be required to at least set up a charity or donate to it.