Money Talks

 

Several things are true at once about basketball, among them:

• The rise in popularity of Caitlin Clark, soon to be a rookie in the WNBA with Indianapolis, has contributed mightily to the rise in popularity of women's basketball.
• Even non-basketball fans follow and support Caitlin, the #1 draft pick in the women's league, while most non-fans could not tell you the name of last year's top pick in the male league (Victor Wembanyama)
• Wembanyama made $12.16 million for his first year, while Clark will make $76,535 for her rookie season.

Forbes magazine, the bible of capitalism, is asking, "Can Caitlin Clark fix the WNBA and NBA pay gap?"

That's asking a lot from one person.  As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar points out, the NBA is a $10 billion business with teams playing 82 games per year.  The WNBA teams play 40 times, and the league itself rolls in $200 million worth of hard-earned fan dollars.

And the women are working under a contract that allows them to carve out just 10% of that pie, whereas the men slice 40% out of their league's much bigger pie. The women's contract is not up for renewal until next year.

You could look it up - baseball players and football players did not make the huge salaries everyone envies these days. People love to say that yesterday's heroes were much better than today's players, well, you had to be among your sport's immortals to crack $100,000 in the 1960s. 

The Baltimore Orioles' greatest pitcher ever was our beloved Jim "Pancakes" Palmer, who, as a 20-year old, won Game Two of the 1966 World Series, shutting out the heavily-favored Los Angeles Dodgers. 

Palmer earned $7,500 that year and spent the offseason selling suits to men at Hamburger's Clothing downtown - he needed the extra $150 a week "to pay for groceries, hot water and electricity.”

As the 70s dawned, it dawned on a labor lawyer named Marvin Miller that the baseball clubs were raking in astronomical amounts of money and saving most of it for themselves, while putting on the old poor mouth and feigning poverty. Miller got the owners to have to open their books and show their profit-and-loss statements, and the next thing you know, the Lords of Baseball had to split their Golden Egg omelet more fairly.

The WNBA players are going to generate a lot of money. They play a much more entertaining and watchable game, to my mind. That will translate to ticket, TV, and cable revenues, and if they find the Marvin Miller of the 2020s, these tall women won't be playing for short money soon.