Why Have Baseball Salaries Skyrocketed This Past Year?

This past off-season in baseball I was shocked to see the huge mega million contracts that players were receiving. It wasn't just the top tier players who were cashing in, but it was also the mediocre and average pitchers cashing in as well. Let me demonstrate what I am talking about.

Gil Meche, Jeff Suppan, Jason Marquis and Ted Lilly all received by 4 or 5 year deals worth approximately 10 million a year. These three pitchers have records near .500 and aren't particularly dominating hitters on the mound. Jeff Supan at least had a great post season run when he shut down the New York Mets and Detroit Tigers. However, former Cardinals player Jason Marquis received a big contract and he had an Earned run Average last year of nearly 6 in a terrible season. Yet the Chicago Cubs foolishly decided to sign him. Ted Lilly also got big time money from the Cubs. The Cubs did spend a lot of money and some of it was on good players like Alfonso Soriano and Aramis Ramirez. However Lilly has already been with several different ball clubs and is not on the rise. He is not a strikeout pitcher and does not posses dominating stuff on the mound. Meche surprisingly signed with the Royals which is baffling considering that the Royals never spend money but not that shocking considering they gave about one-fifth of their payroll money to a player who is not an ace of a pitching staff. Barry Zito just signed the richest contract ever for a pitcher at 7 years for $126 million dollars.

Positional players are also cashing in as Barry Bonds who is completely washed up and a shell of his old self and having a ton of injuries getting 16 million dollars from the Giants. The Red Sox also signed JD Drew for nearly 15 million dollars per year.

So the question is, where have teams been getting this extra money? The system of revenue sharing has given small market teams like the Brewers and Royals extra cash which has led them to make stupid financial decisions like signing an average pitcher like Gil Meche to a deal worth 10 million dollars a year. That money could've definitely been spent a lot better especially because they are a small market team with a limited budget.

Baseball also saw the largest amount of tickets for baseball games ever being sold this past year as teams shattered attendance records. This has to do in part with baseball trying to move towards parity between teams instead of having such dominating teams. Just because teams spend massive amounts of money does not mean that they will be rewarded by a playoff berth as shown by the Texas Rangers.

In addition, every year a new team believes that it can win the World Series. Over the past several years, there has been no repeating champion and the New York Yankees have found themselves being unable to get past their conference playoffs, losing to the Detroit Tigers this past year.

Team payrolls look to increase dramatically as a result of this off-season in which there weren't really all that many star free agent players. Next year that field of free agent players looks to get a lot bigger and have a lot more star talent as players are realizing how much money that can get by becoming a free agent and auctioning off their services. To the average American, these salaries that baseball players are receiving sounds like monopoly money and really have no value. The only thing that baseball fans will care about is if their team is competitive and if ticket prices will increase, which they probably will anyway.