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Originally Posted by packs
Have you considered what nearly a million dollars in purchasing power could have bought you in 1973? It's not apples to apples.
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Have you considered that CPI *is* a measure of purchasing power?
Because it is. And the beauty of it is that it is a representative basket of goods and services, which means it is immune to cherry-picking.
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Everyone could always use more money but his salary put him far ahead of every normal person around him.
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Willie Mays was a generational talent. Comparing him to the average person is, at best, a specious argument. The fact of the matter is that none of us would accept the argument from our employer that they *could* pay us more given our performance and value to the company, but we should just sit down, shut up, and be thankful that we are getting paid a bit more than the average Joe on the street. We'd walk out the door and find someone to pay us what we were worth. And would be right to do so.
Mays, and his contemporaries, didn't have that luxury because of the reserve clause. They may have been paid a lot relative to workaday folks, but they were grossly underpaid relative to the rarity of their talent and the profits they brought to the company that employed them. I got caught up in one of the failed attempts to schedule a Mays signing. I wasn't happy about it, but I will never begrudge him some level of bitterness regarding his treatment by baseball.