Opening Day in Baseball

This past week saw the Major League Baseball season start across 15 cities in the United States. For me, like so many individuals across the country, it should be a national holiday. It's a day when you feel like you're 12 years old and on a Little League field again. For college students, it's the day you bring your laptops to class and watch the games online instead of listening to lectures. But unfortunately, for students and many fans, Opening Day has become a tradition they cannot see live any more.

Opening Day ticket prices have soared into the hundreds and thousands just for one ticket and the average person cannot afford this. In fact, tickets for the entire season have been raised to such a level that most people can go to maybe one game a year, if that. Baseball has become a game that only the rich can attend and that the even richer play.

Baseball is the only major sport in the US that does not have a salary cap. It has what's called a "luxury tax," where if teams go over a certain amount, than they have to pay a fee to smaller teams. This is a system that supposedly helps the smaller market teams that cannot compete with New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. But there is no hard salary cap, or ceiling, that teams cannot go over. So for all intents and purposes, a team can have a $500-million salary -- buying up the best player at every position -- and it would just pay a lot of money to the smaller teams at year's end.

What this has done, aside from create a massive inequality in teams in the MLB, is jack up prices across all stadiums. The new Yankee Stadium does not have a ticket for under $100. That means even the worst outfield seat is still about $100. This is absurd for a baseball game. You can no longer grab a friend, get some beers and hot dogs, and watch a game for cheap.

The reason tickets are going up in price so rapidly -- in addition to demand for the game being at an all-time high according to attendance records -- is the increase in payroll. Team presidents and general managers have to raise revenue to pay for the salaries of all their players. The best way to do this is increase ticket prices. And as long as people will continue to go to the games and pay the ticket price, owners will continue to raise prices and pay the players more.

For the new Yankee park, it's been said that there are over a million millionaires on Long Island, so thats a huge market to pay only $100 for a baseball game. But what about all the fathers and sons who want to watch the game as a vacation ticket? The middle class is being phased out of baseball and that's very unfortunate.

The topic of a salary cap will come up soon for Major League Baseball. The inequality in the teams across the league is too great right now and it will ultimately hurt baseball. There needs to be some parity in the league, which a salary cap will help. But a cap will also help fans. It will help reduce ticket prices, increase player loyalty to individual teams, and create an altogether better dynamic for the sport.

--Parker Swenson