There’s no place like Derek’s home, at least hereabouts. As much
as I love the Grand Old Game, there’s no way of defending the
wretched excess of Major League Baseball’s player pay practices.
Local fans were treated this week to an example of the ridiculous
pass we’ve come to in a
page one story
with color photos in the “Tampa Daily Thunderstorm” of the
biggest and most valuable single-family home in Hillsborough
County.
The home doesn’t belong to a rapacious capitalist of the sort
our rookie president is trying, with little success, to paint Mitt
Romney as. No, the owner of the gaudiest home in Hillsborough did
not get to the top by snatching food from the mouths of widows and
orphans and exporting jobs to third world countries where workers
make 10 cents an hour and would boil their shoes for dinner if they
had shoes. Our un-humble homeowner was able to build digs that
would make Gatsby blush by fielding ground balls and hitting
baseballs toward, and occasionally over, the short right field
porch in Yankee Stadium.
Derek Jeter’s gaudy pile on Davis Island, hard by downtown
Tampa, contains 30,875 square feet, roughly the size of Luxembourg
or the largest truck stop on the Jersey Turnpike, and has nine
bedrooms and seven bathrooms. The house has two zip codes. The
kitchen and the in-laws’ guest bedroom are in different time zones.
Several families could live in the house and never come in contact
with one another or with Derek. It’s further from one end of
Derek’s home to the other than the longest home run he ever hit.
Republicans could stash all their delegates at Derek’s place, less
than a half mile from next month’s national convention
site.
The house that Jeter built is appraised at $12.3 million. The
second most valuable home in Hillsborough is rated at a
comparatively Scrooge-like $6.3 million. But Jeter, who will be
paid $16 million for his services by the Yankees this year,
probably won’t have trouble in the short run keeping up with his
mortgage and paying his property taxes.
Unlike our rookie president, I don’t believe there should be a
cap on how much money individual Americans make, so long as they
come by it honestly. Someone smart once said envy is the only one
of the seven deadlies that’s no fun. There’s certainly none of that
operating here. I would find it a trial just walking through such a
preposterous house, let alone trying to live in it. No way to make
such a behemoth cozy.
Derek is entitled to such style of home as he prefers and can
afford. But the chez Jeter is certainly something to think about
next time a fan with a real job, and the modest income that goes
with it, pays $45 for a ticket for a mediocre seat to a ML game
(after paying $15 to park in an area where there’s at least a 50-50
chance that various valuable parts of his car will have been
stripped and sold on the street before the seventh inning stretch)
and comforts himself with an $9 beer and an $8 hotdog.
I remember buying tickets for decent seats at Fenway Park in the
eighties and getting change from a ten. Back then, for the price of
that same seat now, not only could I sit anywhere I chose, but Carl
Yastrzemski would have driven me home after the game.
Financially, it’s a whole new ball game. And it isn’t just stars
like Jeter distorting baseball finances (and that of other major
league sports). The Major League Baseball minimum salary is
$480,000 per year and the average Major League player is paid more
than $3 million per year (notice I didn’t say “earns”). This is the
reason why, for the average fan, take me out to the ball game often
necessitates a later trip to bankruptcy court. It’s the free market
(except when team owners hold up local governments for tax-payer
funded ball yards). And I’m for free-markets. But even the biggest
fan of free markets knows they can have their mad moments. Derek
Jeter’s new home is proof of that.
There. I’ve said it and I’m glad.
