The 14th of October, Year 2014 will forever be remembered as the day when talented and successful baseball executives struck it rich.
Or began to, anyway.
It's long been obvious that good general managers were massively underpaid, relative to labor.
Granted, we don't know how much money Andrew Friedman was paid to run Baseball Operations for the Tampa Bay Rays. But we can guess it was significantly less than the $7 million James Loney will earn next season as baseball's 25th-best first baseman. Which does not seem, has never seemed, quite right.
The old model almost exploded more than a decade ago when Billy Beane nearly signed with the Red Sox. Granted, Beane ultimately did quite well for himself by staying in Oakland. Just a few years later, he picked up a four-percent ownership stake in the club, which might be worth something like $20 million today.
But Beane did stay in Oakland, and I can't recall a single instance since of a franchise luring a top executive from another franchise that wanted to keep him.
Until now.
This will hardly be the last time, though. Brilliant baseball men have been ridiculously underpaid for a long time. But with reveues skyrocketing for franchises in the big markets and a growing understanding of those executives' value -- especially relative to non-superstar players -- it was just a matter of time before teams like the Dodgers and Yankees and Phillies began to spend whatever it takes to acquire the top management talent. Particularly considering the increasing difficulty of acquiring those superstar, difference-making players.
Of course, there aren't many Andrew Friedmans out there. But there will be a trickle-down effect, and I suspect that we'll soon see a) more movement than ever before, and b) skyrocketing salaries for smart baseball ops people, and not just those at the top.
For a long time, those people have been forced to choose between making a fortune and loving their job. Those days might be over soon.
