William J. Holstein

CEO Pay--What About Sports, Entertainment?
APRIL 23--I recently went to a New York Yankees baseball game with my wife, Rita. We paid $90 per seat plus some minor processing fees, then paid to take a train to the stadium and paid more money for $7 beers and such. Let's say we spent $250 (for a bad game, by the way. The Bronx bombers simply could not hit Pineira of the Los Angeles Angels.)

I later told a guy at a hardware store about this experience and he erupted: "You can't take a family to a baseball game anymore. They've made it way too expensive. They've built these big new stadiums and paid millions of dollars to the players, but they've priced me out.'

So where is the rage about this? Alex Rodriguez makes more than $20 million a year. Others clock in pretty close to that. Isn't baseball a national good? Is there no public interest to be served? Or is it all business, just about pure profit? I could argue that taking away baseball and many other professional sporting events, by overpricing them, has a more direct impact on the happiness of Americans that the CEOs of successful corporations making similar money.

The other realm that continues to outrage me is entertainment. If you flip the channels looking for quality entertainment, on cable channel after cable channel, we are told that we have to pay to get this. We have to pay more to get that. We're already paying Cablevision handsomely for this service, so why do we have to pay more? Again, part of the answer is that a Conan O'Brien, who I have never watched and will never watch, walked away with $40 million. He gets paid the big bucks; I get dreck on my TV. Where is the justice in that? This cultural wasteland has a bigger impact on the American quality of life than any CEO compensation flap.