AS I SEE IT COLUMN: The most obscene sports contract in world history

Most sports know by now that world’s richest contract was recently signed. Juan Soto of the New York Yankees moved across the city to the New York Mets for the breathtaking amount of just over $1 billion (all figures in Canadian funds) over 15 years. It is the biggest contract in professional sports history.

Is Juan Soto the best player in baseball?

He’s not even the best baseball player in New York City. Aaron Judge of the Yankees is by most accounts a better player than Soto.

Regardless, it’s a staggering amount of money.

If you break down Soto’s contract into paycheques and hourly wages like most of us get paid, every two weeks Soto will make $393,180 or $4,914 an hour.

To play baseball.

To try and put this into some kind of understandable context – I think most people blank out when they hear about massive contracts, simply because it is so far removed from reality – the aide working at a nursing home in Manitoba, emptying bed pans and changing diapers of your loved ones, could be paid as little as $15.80.

That means the aide would have to work for more than six weeks to make what Soto makes in 60 minutes.

In what moral universe does that make any sense?

Sure, stadiums will not be filled with people who want to watch someone change a senior’s diaper or bed pan, but in terms of who is doing more good in this world – the guy who is good at hitting a ball versus the person taking care of grandma or grandpa – it’s not even close.

In the same way tourists walking out of the Coliseum in Rome wonder how people could have watched lions devouring people, I maintain that historians will look back on our generation and wonder how we got our priorities so wildly out of whack.

There is so much poverty on our continent. So much hunger and homelessness. Yet we don’t seem to have a problem paying millionaire athletes, who toil for billionaire owners and play in multi-billion dollar stadiums.

What is wrong with us?

Why do we place such an inordinate amount of importance of people who can hit a ball, catch a football or shoot a puck, when there is so much need in our world?

Soto’s salary is obscene and grotesque, yet I don’t blame him. I blame us, the people who keep on watching and paying these outrageous salaries.

Here’s a thought experiment.

How many of you make one million dollars in a calendar year? Precious few I would argue. What if a law was passed that said no athlete, no Hollywood actor, can be paid more than a million dollars a year. Anything more than that goes to charity or schools or hospitals or life-saving medical research.

The athlete still has a lifestyle most of us can never dream of, and society gets a lot of money it can give to people and organizations that desperately need help. Soto gets his one million, and society gets the remaining $10 million to help others in need.

Is there no salary that forces sane, rational sports fans to collectively say “enough already!”?

As long as sports fans are willing to watch sports on TV, buy tickets and attend games in person and buy the merch, these immoral salaries will only get higher and higher, and more and more grotesque.