Around 1989 or so the baseball industry was worth a total of two
billion dollars. That means everything spent on baseball, ticket sales,
advertising, hot dogs, player salaries, everything circulated two (2)
billion dollars in our economy.
If you think about it, baseball at that time was a part of everyone's
life. We all, in America, participated in baseball to one degree or
another if it be just listening to news reports about a players pitching
record or attending the games and eating hot dogs with the kids, we all
apent time with base ball and new something about it.
If you take a start up business, in America, one of the most daunting
costs is advertising. You'd be lucky indeed if you had a successful
advertising campaign that made your local community aware of your
business. Here was baseball with a two billion dollar example showing how
much it cost to, excuse the word, 'invade' our social fabric and become,
to one degree or another, part of everyone's lifestyle.
That same year, 1989, President Bush announced that the federal
government was going to spend seven (7) billion on the war on drugs.
Imagine if you will, how invasive baseball was to everyone's lives when
two billion was spent in the industry, and that the drug war, with three
and half times as much money, seven billion, could be in everyone's life
styles.
A drug war is different than base ball of course. The results and the
publics part or going to be different. One apparent outcome is that now
we have a prison industrial complex that two (2) percent of the population
must answer to. Is that a measure of how much seven billion dollars can
invade our lives.
Now if you will, know that the federal government announced that it
was going to spend an additional forty (40) billion dollars on security
after 9/11. Since then the price tag has been upped to tens or hundreds
of billions of dollars. So I'm wondering, if we spent the same amount on
baseball, how many of us would playing baseball, whether we wanted to or
not. Are we?
