Greed, a Synonym for Capitalism!- Marty K’s Unfiltered Sports Takes Episode 3

Greed, a Synonym for Capitalism!- Marty K’s Unfiltered Sports Takes Episode 3

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Marty Kay's Unfiltered Sports Takes, where opinions and facts intersect. This is yours truly, Marty Kaiser. Be there. Happy Tuesday, everyone. This is Marty Kaiser here with our Tuesday Marty Kay's Unfiltered Sports Podcast. Hope everyone had a great weekend. Got a lot of cool things to go over today. As I mentioned in our last podcast, I was going to go over a lot about kind of sports, what I would call hypocrisy. And there's a lot of information to go over. So I'm going to go over those things in detail today. And we're going to focus on that. So basically, all three sports are driven by money. And you know, we've had so much publicity lately about capitalism versus quote-unquote democratic socialism. I'm not here to give you a political editorial, but I will start off when we discuss these concepts about giving you facts. We were predicated on a capitalistic society in the United States. And obviously, if you took economics, you've got Adam Smith and the like that we've kind of followed their blueprint. However, for many years, in my opinion, and I think this is where the citizenry embellishes and the media doesn't do a good job of educating people, we don't have a pure economic society. We have a combination of capitalism and socialism. And you can't have a pure economic society. And why do I say that? Well, let's let's look briefly at how our United States functions. We have a lot of social programs. We have, for example, food stamps, we have rent subsidies, we have income tax breaks, we have health care subsidies that were started with Obamacare. When we have tragedies, we have FEMA's involvement. So we have a lot of different components of our society. Oh, and we also have unemployment. When somebody gets terminated from their job, they can apply for unemployment. And obviously, unemployment varies from state to state. Florida is probably one of the poorer ones with unemployment, and other states sometimes are a little bit more generous. But the reason I bring that up as an introduction, because if you call the social program socialism, then you can say, well, we're a socialistic society. But if you call I want to make as much money as I can, then we're a capitalistic society. So we're a melding of the two and we're always going to be that way. You may be of the opinion that we should have more social programs or we should have lower tax rates. So it's a question of what your philosophies are, but we're always going to be a permutation of those two. So let's start off with that premise. Now let's go into sports. And I'm going to cover the three major American sports in this podcast. Football, basketball, and baseball. And, you know, so you're not going to get a lot of sympathy for sports going on strike. You're going to have some people that favor the owners, you're going to have other people that favor the players. You know, this is a case of the millionaires versus the billionaires. So it's hard to be sympathetic to either party. But again, let's correlate this to capitalism because there's so much publicity about capitalism. In a true capitalistic society, from an earnings standpoint, you're not limited on what you can earn. The more skilled you are, the more your skills are in demand, the less competition you have for a position. All those things factor into your potential earnings. For example, myself, I'm in real estate. So the only person that limits my income basically is myself. I mean, I have to deal with market factors. Obviously, if it's a strong market, a weak market, the brokerage that I work with, what type of programs do they have available for their agents. And then, of course, the commission structures, how much do consumers pay their agent on a transaction? And those things can all vary. So it's up to me, obviously, to decide what kind of situations are best suited to me. But I can control my income from the following manners. Number one, I can pick who I work with, both as a brokerage and as consumers or customers. Number two, I can decide on how hard I want to work. If business is a little slower, I might have to work harder. You know, whether it's doing more open houses on the weekends, whether it's doing more prospecting, whether it's trying to generate more referral business. If I have problem deals to put extra effort in to make sure that those transactions close. So I have control over my earnings to a very large degree. Now, the one thing about real estate, which some people like and some don't like, is I don't get a salary. So if I don't sell product or services, then I don't make any income. And I put in all these hours potentially and not generating any income. So that never bothers me because I knew that going in, and fortunately I've been pretty successful in real estate. But a lot of people don't like that uh what I call uncertainty of income. They want to have a salary job where they know every week or every two weeks, if they're in an upper management job, they're getting paid an annual salary that's divided by 52 weeks, and that's their weekly salary. Uh if they're an hourly employee, like in our area, we have a ton of hourly employees. We have the theme park employees, we have people that are working in hotels, uh, etc. So those guys make an hourly rate. And of course, there's been a lot of publicity over the years on the low hourly rates. They've gone up recently, but a lot of people argue that a lot of the hourly rates are not a livable wage. I'm not here to discuss the merits of that, but obviously people are paid hourly. So, for example, if you work a traditional 40-hour week and you make, let's say, $20 an hour, that's $800 a week, what we call gross income before taxes and all the other deductions that you have. So if you multiply $800 times 52 weeks, that comes to an annual income of $41.6. Well, as you know, from the cost of living, it's just gotten higher and higher over the years. Cost of housing, cost of rental properties, cost of food, cost of gasoline. And now we're in an inflation time. So you're not going to live what I call very fat on 41.6. You're really going to have to uh budget yourself carefully. Uh unexpected setbacks may dramatically affect you. And if you're a uh married person or have a partner, you basically are going to need their income in order to support a family. And that's been one of the challenges in American society over the past 45, 50 years, is that you have uh the majority of families have two incomes, which is good from an income standpoint. But if you have children, you have issues. How much time are you spending with children and who's raising your children during the formative years? Are you getting a live-in nanny? For and those are for people that are more affluent, or are you putting your kids in daycare? What kind of training does the daycare have? And of course, how much are you paying for daycare? So these are all issues that we're facing in the 21st century. But they're not gonna, you know, we haven't come up with a good solution to any of those. So those are the the two typical types of income. Obviously, people in sales like myself, we're typically on commission. And then you have a third category of people that are tipped tip earners. Uh the the easiest example of that are people that work in restaurants. They get a significant amount of their income from tips. And their hourly rate is allowed to be less than minimum wage. I believe right now, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think you can make half of minimum wage. That's all the restaurant is required to pay you, you know, plus however, whatever kind of division they have for your tip income. So those folks are kind of at the mercy on how busy their restaurant is, how many servers they're competing with, how expensive the average bill is in a restaurant. Obviously, the higher the bill is, generally speaking, the the higher the tips are gonna be for the server. So that that's a third category of income. So now we're gonna um transition a little bit to what we started talking about with sports. So in baseball, as I mentioned, there's a good chance they're gonna go on strike in December. Well, why are they gonna go on strike? Well, right now there's some punitive things for higher spending teams, like they pay luxury taxes and the like, but there's no maximum that they're allowed to pay. So right now in baseball, the biggest uh point of contention for some people is the lack of controls has allowed a team like the Los Angeles Dodgers to pay their players just astronomical sums. So the Dodgers' payroll right now is over $400 million. And then they're able to be creative and defer some of the payments. So all those things are completely legal, even though a lot of teams either weren't as creative or their players didn't cooperate, so they weren't paying deferred income. Now keep that figure in mind: 400 plus million payroll on an annual basis. And then you'll get a team like the Tampa Bay Rays, and I mention them because I'm in Florida and I'm a Rays fan. And the Tampa Bay Rays are paying their payroll uh approximately, and I might be a little off on this, let's say somewhere between 100 and 130 million a year. So they're paying less than a third of what the Dodgers pay. That's a huge disparity. So, what does that mean? Well, that means the Dodgers have a lot more flexibility when they're bidding for star players that are what we call free agents. They have pretty much unlimited resources where the Rays don't. Uh the Rays usually don't compete for the top players because they can't afford to pay them. Secondly, the Rays cannot afford to make mistakes. Uh if they make a mistake, it really sets their team back. And you might you might think, well, why is there such a disparity? Well, there's a few reasons why. Number one, the Dodgers are in a bigger market, so they have far many more people that can attend their games. They have a much huger TV contract. Uh it's not comparable to the Rays. And probably thirdly, you know, the Rays are in a they have a terrible stadium, it's poorly located. The Rays have never drawn well, so they've always been in a big disadvantage. And historically, what the Rays have done is a couple things, which you've got to give them credit for, but it's really put a ceiling on them. Number one, when their players achieve a certain level of excellence, they have to trade the player. Why? Because they can't afford to pay them. And they've had players throughout the years that when they get to a certain level, the Rays trade them before they become free agents and they get nothing for them. That's a tremendous disadvantage because you would like your teams to keep their star players, all things being equal. Um, the Rays very rarely, if ever, sign a free agent of any noteworthiness. And if they do make a mistake, like I mentioned, it can really hurt them. Like probably five or six years ago, they had a blooming star in their uh what they call their minor league system called Julio Franco. They thought he he had superstar written all over him. So they were one of the first teams, if not the first teams, to pay him what they call future earnings contract, meaning that even though he was in the minor leagues where they don't make much money, they gave him a multi-million dollar contract for like a seven or eight-year period. Uh, it's kind of based on what I call the cum. They were, they had analyzed his skill set and predicted that he was going to become a top player. And by signing him at this young age, I think he was like 18, 19 years old, they locked his salary in for a number of years. So if they were correct in their assumption, as he achieved star status, they had a bargain contract with him. The gamble they take is if they misforecast him and things went haywire, then they were paying him a fair amount of money, which for the Rays was a lot of money, and they weren't getting the equal performance back. Now, interestingly, with Julio Franco, he became a star. He was on the all-star team, I think his second year in the league. Uh, so it looked like a great, great move. He was their best player already, and the team looked like it had a great future. And then Julio Franco got into major legal problems with some activities in his home country of the Dominican Republic with underage women. And without going into detail, it looks like he'll probably never play in the major leagues again. He may never get a visa to come back to the United States. So the Rays had invested all this money, now their payments have stopped to him, but yet they they predicated a lot of their future moves on his stardom, and overnight he was gone. And since he it's been about three or four years now, um, they've never replaced him. They play a shortstop at, I mean, they play, the player that replaced him at shortstop, walls, is uh a very good fielder, but he's one of the most uh poor hitters in baseball, so it's been a huge step back for them. So that's just an example. Other teams that usually pay a lot of payroll. Currently, the New York Mets have the second highest payroll. Now, interestingly, the Mets have been an abomination this year. Um the management personnel that run the organization, David Stearns and company, just made some horrible acquisitions. So the Mets kind of refute what I just told you. They paid all this money, yet they're one of the worst teams in baseball. So it just shows that money's not a guarantee for uh success. But it does give you a lot more margin for error. Now the Rays, it's it just so happens, they're leading their division this year, uh, in spite of them having one of the lowest payrolls in the league. And they've achieved their success with tremendous player evaluation, tremendous coaching and managerial skills because they they get players in that are uh mediocre, maybe they've been released by their teams, but the Rays see something in them, and the Rays improve them dramatically. It's a phenomenon that's not done by too many teams, and you've got to give them total credit. They also have a very astute analytic system, so they can kind of predict success on players that maybe weren't having as much success. So all these factors have enabled the Rays, in spite of not having any money, to be a very successful franchise over the past 15 years. They occasionally have a down year, but for the most part, they're probably one of the top five or six records in baseball. Uh so they've done a tremendous job and major credit to them. In fact, the the architect of their uh program was a gentleman named Friedman, and um he left he left their organization uh probably between five and ten years ago, probably closer to ten than five, and he went to the Los Angeles Dodgers. So uh, not coincidentally, he here's a guy that was a genius for the skills I just mentioned, and then he goes to an organization that is that has the deepest pockets. So the combination of his skill set and unlimited funds has made the Dodgers the the uh top team in baseball. They've won the last two World Series and they're favored to win this year's World Series. But the thing is, when you talk about the upcoming strike, what is your feelings on it? You you know, you can say as a as a blue-collar worker, let's say, you can say, I'm busting my rear end for 25, 30 bucks an hour, and then these baseball players are making five, ten, twenty, thirty million a year. So it's hard to feel sorry for them. I agree it is hard to feel sorry for them. Um that being said, why should you limit their earning potential? Where if if Major League Baseball gets their way and puts in a salary cap, that means that teams like the Dodgers would have a they couldn't go above a certain payroll. Like right now, I was telling you they're at 400 plus million. That's going to change. I don't know what it would change to, but they'll be constrained so they won't be able to just spend money like they are right now. So the theory is that'll be a more level playing field. The flip side of that is if you're a capitalist, why should the players be penalized? I mean, think about it. If you go to a rock concert or you go see Taylor Swift or you see your favorite rapper, those guys make as much money as they can generate. And, you know, you go to concerts, uh they're all selling scalping tickets, and the price for these concerts are astronomical. Unfortunately, our system in terms of compensation uh and philosophical things has gone haywire. I'll use a recent example of what I mean. The New York Knicks, who had not won. An NBA championship for 53 years. They won the championship this year in 2026. It was huge news and it was in our media market, New York. But when they went to the championship series and played the San Antonio Spurs, tickets were going for thousands and thousands of dollars to see a basketball game. And so who was attending these basketball games? Was it the true fans that have supported the Knicks during their poor play for years? No. It was corporate people, it was celebrities, etc. If you watched the games on the court, you know, you saw all these celebrities. You saw Ben Stiller, you saw Travis Kelsey, you saw Spike Lee, just to name a few. And then the people that were in the box, in the boxes and stuff, a lot of them were corporate. And some of the tickets sold for six figures. To me, that's disgusting. Now, I'm a huge sports fan. And, you know, I like my home teams. I like a few other teams, but I'm a big Orlando Magic fan and I like the Tampa Bay Rays. I don't go to the Tampa Bay Rays games much because it's close to a two-hour drive to St. Petersburg. It's in a terrible location. And it's a crummy stadium. So, and the tickets are not cheap. Um, but I would the ticket prices probably wouldn't scare me off, but all the other factors, the combination of that, I'm not gonna go to many games. Basketball-wise, the Orlando Magic, I had season tickets for years, and they make huge money in basketball too. But the price of just regular tickets for a mediocre team to get decent seats at the Orlando Arena, you know, you're gonna pay $100, $200 a ticket easy. Then you factor in, you're gonna pay another $10 or $20 for parking. You're gonna get a hot dog that's gonna run you $10. So it's not an inexpensive night out. And I was still willing to do that to some degree, but over the years, the Magic have been a very mediocre club ever since they lost Dwight Howard, and that's been uh more than 10 years ago. And I'm not gonna pay all that money to see a mediocre product. And then you factor that in in basketball with what they call a lot of teams tanked up till this year. Now they're changing the rules to try to discourage that. So you might see your favorite team, and they don't play any other good players. So you're paying $150, $200 a ticket, and you're seeing second string players, or you're seeing minor league players. Ridiculous. They don't give you refunds back. I mean, it it's just it's just mind-boggling. The Magic had a very mediocre year this year, played under their potential. In my opinion, they were kind of a dull team. They weren't very well coached. I didn't see maximum effort a lot of games, but yet I'm gonna pay all this money for tickets. So, the combination of those things, I wasn't gonna be an in-person supporter. And I think a lot of people feel that way about affordability and about lack of effort. And this is the way it is, uh, especially in basketball and baseball, about the salaries, the mediocrity of a lot of teams, etc. Um, you know, and it's real problems. Now, I don't believe in a salary cap because I think you should make as much money as possible. And I also blame that to a large degree on consumers. Um I know, you know, my kids, uh, friends of theirs, um, even parents, you know, they'll pay ungodly sums to go to concerts. Well, as long as people are willing to pay these ungodly sums, the prices aren't going down. It's a question of supply and demand. And as long as demand exceeds supply, you're gonna pay through the nose. You know, we used to have laws in the United States. You couldn't scalp tickets. So if what they call the face value of a ticket was 50 bucks, technically you were violating the law if you sold it for more than that. And there's a lot of people now, ticket brokers and professional ticket scalpers. Through various means, they'll buy up and control as many tickets as they can for these popular events, and then they'll sell them for huge amounts. Now you can say that's capitalism. I think that's gouging, and you're gouging a lot of the less affluent or middle class people from attending these games, and I just think that's wrong. Our government could change that, but our government, unfortunately, to a large degree encourages this type of greed in our society, and you see greed continually, and it's just wrong. But we don't have leaders with with a spine. Because what runs our country really, lobbyist and payola, and uh I won't go into politics, and I could I could spend days on this, but I think most people are pretty disillusioned by our political system. Both parties, in my opinion, do a disservice to their country for different reasons, but I think they're both an embarrassment and and the lack of integrity and and ethics is just an abomination. So those are some of the things that go on with money. Now I'm going to transition a little bit to gambling. Gambling, especially up till about you know less than 10 years ago, gambling was a mortal sin. They would never have a team in Las Vegas. You couldn't legally bet on sporting events, etc. So that's why people would go to Las Vegas to legally bet. And we had a proliferation of an underground industry called bookmakers. Bookmakers have been around for years. So when betting was illegal, you would call your local bookie and make a bet. And it was, everybody did, I shouldn't say everybody did it, but a lot of people did it, and it was just part of life. Um and it was, you know, there were different viewpoints on uh betting with bookmakers. Uh you you did subsidize some criminal activity, so obviously that was a significant downside. So, anyway, over the years gambling has has become legalized. Why has it become legalized? Because of all the money they make. And the major beneficiaries of this earnings are the owners of sporting teams. Go watch any kind of sporting event on TV. You'll see all these graphics that come on. You can click and make bets on TV. You can make uh what I call proposition bets. You can bet on whether a player is going to score more or less points in a game, who's gonna be ahead for the first five innings of a game. There's a lot of different uh proposition bets on. And the owners all a lot of them have investments in these gambling sites, DraftKings and the like. Robert Kraft uh is involved in a gambling site. In fact, Adam Schechter, who's a um he's a well-known NFL guy, uh, he's also an investor in this. And has come out recently that maybe he's not reporting as accurately as he could on some of these activities that involve owners that have gambling interests. It's just setting the stage for all the corruptness, and we've had a number of uh gambling incidents that have been illegal the past 18 months. Uh, primarily in major league, I mean in the National Basketball Association, we've had some in college basketball too, uh, because of these proposition bets and the and the easy way they can influence games. If you want to really have a clean sport, you have to have a separation between gambling and the sport. And as long as our owners are gonna make money doing this, they're not gonna stop. Because capitalism in its purest form is greed related. You do find some philanthropists that donate a lot of money and such, but there's a lot of greed. And think about it from a philanthropy standpoint. If we didn't have tax breaks for these wealthy millionaires and billionaires, how much would their philanthropy decrease? Uh, I'm a capitalist, but I think our form of capitalism has just gotten out of hand. Again, if you study the last 45 years or so, the income gap between the lower echelon of folks, income-wise, and the wealthy people, has diametrically shifted where the spread is way larger. I mean, you got people like Elon Musk. How much money should somebody be worth? He's worth hundreds of billions, and I think he might have a contract where he's gonna get trillions now. That's grotesque. Nobody needs that kind of money. How many homes does an individual need? Some of these guys own double-digit homes. They use them, what, a couple weeks a year. Uh, you know, it's just gotten ridiculous, but it's really permeated into sports. So between the greed and there's no loyalty in sports now, the owners don't have the loyalty they used to have to their players. And of course, the players don't have the loyalty because they see number one how the owners behave, and number two, if they're in a position where they become a free agent and can make more money on the open market, of course, most of them are going to select that option, and you can't blame them. So it's really, in my opinion, uh takes away from sports. I know when when I was a lot younger, the players that you grew up with stayed with the team, so you had it, you know, you identified with the players. Now you see guys, I'll I'll look at, you know, they'll have, let's say, a Tracy McGrady jersey with the Magic's jersey on it. And then he played for several teams after that. So his jersey is quickly outdated. Now the the NBA likes it because they sell more jerseys. If you're a Tracy McGrady fan, you're gonna get jerseys from the different teams he plays with. So they're gonna make more money off of that. So it's it to me, it's really uh a sad commentary on sports. Um, you know, now you've got a new owner in Portland, for example, and he's just the opposite. He's a very wealthy guy, and he's just doing things that are penurious. He's paying his coach, and the coaches have a very difficult job. He's paying them way less than anybody else is making. They're on a one-year make-good contract, so it makes his job much harder and much higher pressure. Now you can say he doesn't have to take the job, and that's true. But if he didn't take it, the owner would eventually find somebody else to take it. This owner's also threatening to leave Portland. Portland's been a great basketball city. But this owner has no loyalty. The only thing he believes in is money. So if he can't uh kind of blackmail the city for giving him all the uh benefits he wants with stadium improvements, he'll leave. And chances are the owners are gonna let him leave. They never should have approved him as an owner if they really had the welfare of this of the league and the city at heart. He had a history of this type of behavior, and they let him in anyway. So shame on Adam Silber. And now you've got, like the Los Angeles Clippers, it looks like they've done some illegal activities trying to go around their the salary cap in basketball. And I won't go into detail because the salary cap's fairly involved and somewhat confusing. But they're owned by Steve Ballmer, who's a multi-billionaire. He was uh one of the founders of Microsoft. So he's got a ton of money, and he's claiming ignorance that he was unaware of these things. Well, do you think a billionaire that's a great businessman that's accumulated wealth, that's highly educated, is unaware of he's got a 60 or 80 million dollar investment in a third-party company that's usurping the salary cap, and he's unaware of this? I think most people would be very skeptical of that, and that's to put it lightly. So this I'm just touching the iceberg on this. There's going to be more situations that come along that we talk about these issues. But unfortunately, you know, the one thing the United States has done is we're we're kind of victims of corporate greed, corporate insensitivity, you know, and then when you're faced with corporations, you're all that also goes to AI now. Is AI can do more and more things? Corporations will have no problem laying people off. Because again, it's they're looking at the stockholder equity. So if they can increase their uh stock share price per share, they could care less about laying off loyal people. And it's just sad, but until until the American population stands up and doesn't support this type of activity, but we you can definitely start with sports and entertainment. You can say, I'm not paying this ticket anymore and not go to the event. And if enough people stayed away from the events, they'd have to make some changes. But we'll go over this more in the future. Um I did want to uh, in closing out, give props to the Tampa Bay Rays again. They're on a seven-game winning streak, they're about a six-game lead, and again with a low payroll. It's just phenomenal how they're doing it. They really only have one or two really top quality players, but yet they're getting maximum production from these uh unknown players. And, you know, it would be great for sports if somehow they could get to the World Series andor win it. It'll be a tough chore for them, but I'm rooting for them. They deserve a ton of credit. The NFL is just starting training camp. Uh, what you're hearing in training camp, probably the biggest thing you hear is about all the injuries. And some of these are season ending or worse. So what we didn't cover the NFL today because I have a little different philosophy about salaries than the NFL. I'll just say briefly, they have short career spans, they can have disabling injuries, they have brain injuries, they have a they they pass away at a younger age. So, in my opinion, they earn every dollar and then some in football. And so I look at them a little differently. But it's a little early to talk about football other than we're starting preseason this week. We just had the Hall of Fame game this past Thursday. The NFL season will start, I believe it's the first week of September, and we'll talk about football more as we amp up into the season. We'll also be talking about baseball more as we get into the playoffs. Uh, basketball doesn't start until the first half of October, so we won't be talking about basketball as much in the near future. So that's all for today. Think about greed. Think about the labels we put on corporate versus democratic socialist. I mean, capitalism versus democratic socialist. Neither of them are really accurate. People like to brand things, but a lot of times branding is inaccurate. So that's all for today. Stay hydrated, stay safe. This is Marty Kaiser out.