average salary in baseball is around 2 million dollars a year.
i believe the average baseball career is 8 or 9 years (which is much longer than other professional sports).
add to that, contracts in the mlb are guaranteed (i.e. you'll get your money, unlike the nfl, where you must make the team each season, and at that you have to make it halfway through the season to ensure you get all your contract says it will, but i digress).
baseball's are provided by major league baseball, not the team, if i'm not mistaken. this would mean the baseball is the property of the mlb, not the red sox. as many baseballs end up in fans hands, there is no charge to the fans (which is different from the nfl and the nba, which charges players the cost of the ball if given to a fan as a "souvenir"). i'm not sure if teams buy a certain amount of mlb branded baseballs for every game, or if each team puts in the same amount of money to buy a billion balls (over exaggerated of course) for the entire league.
in any event, mlb said he owns the ball.
i've never seen/heard of the mlb or a team trying to get a ball back for free. it would seem that if the red sox indeed want it, they need to ante up the money to get it back from the guy.
unfortunately for the player, it may hurt his career, as it won't look good within the red sox organization. while i understand that players make a lot of money, the other side is that the teams is making gobs of money (remember, they do pay these high salaries!).
__________________
An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of inprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law. - Martin Luther King, Jr.
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. - Malcolm X
|