A Million Dollar Man is a Bargain!

Steve Austin, TV's original million-dollar man, would be an incredible bargain by today’s standards. He was employed in the military and designed to protect and safeguard our country. Steve was worth every cent! The really important question today is, “Is Carsten Charles Sabathia worth $161 million over seven year, for just throwing a baseball for the New York Yankees?"

CC Sabathia, the six foot seven, three hundred pound monster baseball pitcher signed recently for $161 million. That translates to a little over half a million dollars a pound or two million dollars a vertical inch! And he doesn’t have a bionic arm or an X-ray eye! How is he going to help keep us safe and secure from potential terrorist attacks?

Sabathia will basically receive $23 million a year over the contract. Last year, he won 17 games, pitched 253 innings and struck out 251 batters. If you would like to be able to share useless information with friends, these statistics, if he duplicated them this year, translate as follows: he would earn $1.35 million for each win, or $91 thousand for each inning pitched, or $91 thousand for each batter he struck out. Starting in April 2009, if he pitched nine innings and won the game, while striking out ten batters, his contribution to this team would be valued at 2 million dollars for just that one-day’s “work”!

Many would be critical of a ball player being paid these astronomical sums of money. The reality, however, is it is not the player's fault to accept a $161 million offer; it is the misguided business sense of a baseball club owner to make the preposterous offer. You can’t blame Sabathia for accepting the money. After all, he is a growing lad and has a family, including three children, to support. He is just fortunate to possess a talent that few others in the world possess – even though his skills will not help with homeland security issues like Steve Austin’s did.

One of the curious sidelights of this deal was the last minute negotiations, which added an extra one million to an earlier $160 million offer. The highest paid pitcher in history had been Johan Santana whose contract calls for $22.9 million a year. If Sabathia had signed for only $160 million his average salary would have only been $22.85 million. The addition of the extra one million dollars raised Sabathia’s average salary to $23 million a year. Even with a totally outrageous salary package, it was important to the ego of Sabathia or the marketing managers of the Yankees, to be able to say that Sabathia’s salary is the highest of any pitcher in baseball. Let’s just hope that he earns it – if that is humanly possible!

PS. I think that the New York Yankees would have been wise to pay for my consulting services. If the Yankees had offered CC $160,020,000 instead of $161 million, his average salary would have been $23.86 million and still elevated him to the highest price pitcher ever. They would have saved $980,000 and I am sure been happy to offer me at least a $100,000 bonus for my mathematical prowess.