MLB: over paid or under paid?

During this baseball season I have noticed some sort of discomfort from the MLB fans. I have asked around and a common complaint is that MLB players are not giving their best performances because they may have lost their will to achieve more; some MLB fans blame this lack of motivation to the fact that they feel the players are overpaid. A fan actually told me, and I quote “making $10-20-30 Million over the next 6-8 years, it would be natural to slack off because I'm already being paid for good or bad future performances.” This worries me since Major League Baseball was actually one of the most respected sports, are the MLB teams really messing things up with the players’ salaries? Are the fans really bored of watching million dollar baseball players “slack off” at a game they love?

A possible solution to this issue, could be to actually have a base salary for all the MLB players and bonuses that will increase depending on the players’ performance, yet this solution could be kind of utopist for now. Some of the most overpaid players right now earn more than $14 million dollars, which is the case of Carlos Delgado from the New York Mets, at this moment Carlos’ contract is worth a nice $14.5 million dollars. Yet, if we take this kind of numbers as reference, there are also some valuable MLB players being underpaid, with contracts that earned them only $500 000. This is not making any sense if you ask me. Right now in baseball, major league standings are normal, yet the fans seem concerned about the kind of plays they are actually watching. We all know for a fact that most of the overpaid baseball players are not providing much game. At this moment, the New York Yankees is the highest paid team in Major League Baseball, almost earning twice as much as the Boston Red Sox; the worst paid team is the Florida Marlins.

Baseball teams are also being more open to the kind of deals they are able to offer their players; such is the case of the Milwaukee Brewers, who have two of their most important players on less than $500 000 contracts. Some regulation is obviously necessary, unfortunately no one seems to ready and get their hands dirty on a clean up. For the moment, we can sit and watch the matches hoping that the baseball betting odds remain profitable and not think about the players’ wallet while we are at it.