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Sports salaries, and then real life

A draft, archived, and forgotten. It's released, months late and unfinished. Never mind the now obsolete claims, throughout.

This is merely a thought. Some light consideration of sports salaries. Nothing in-depth. Merely guesswork and supposition. No evidence. No proof. No editing. No expansion. I'm just going to write out some vague ideas that are lurking below the surface of my thoughts. A free writing exercise.
I enjoy sports. Always have. Probably always will. Can no longer play sports. Injuries and accidents have robbed me of mobility, especially in the past five years. I'm done with anything involving running. Or heavy lifting.
Was intrigued to see David Price, formerly (and shortly) of the Toronto Blue Jays had signed with the Boston Red Sox for $217 million dollars. Wow. That's a lot more money than I could earn in my entire lifetime. I'd have to win the lottery. Just wow.
Seems obscene, but then again, I also subscribe to the old maxim, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it". In the end, I don't really care. It's ridiculous. It's not really real, in the end.
Honestly, money's a funny thing. We ruin ourselves for it, and it's not actually something tangible. It's merely a promise. A dream. A social contract, of sorts. Which is probably why it works.
I can't bring myself to resent these athletes for signing these contracts. What's ridiculous to me is how there are people in this world who are wealthy enough to give out these sort of pay cheques. That's what's obscene.
How can one person, or any one group of people have such riches. That's ridiculous. How did we allow this?
Through a loophole in our collective consciousness, I suppose. Psychotics are more determined to earn than us normal folk, willing to do anything to make a buck.
And what's funny, is by that, these psychotics really are willing to do anything. They'll subscribe to the most ridiculous notions even when there's evidence enough to suggest they're following some crazy ass line of thinking straight down to its common denominator.
Consider in hockey the idea of 'the code'. It's some form of nebulous values and principles that us mortal observers simply cannot comprehend. Hockey teams simply cannot win without it, somehow. Apparently, it has nothing to do with one team being better at all the measurable hockey bits than its opponent. Hockey teams are more than willing to throw a skilled player to the wolves in favor of goons whose skills involve nothing more than staging fights.
Of course, any organization needs good people throughout it, but....
You know, what I'm trying to say, in the end, is, simply, results matter. In any way of life. But the way sports organizations measure success is oftentimes convoluted and, frankly, insane. It's as predicated on superstition and faith, as much as it relies on simple observation and fact.
The fact is, David Price is probably worth his new pay cheque. The Blue Jays failure in retaining him has probably costed the team wins. But they followed their code, whatever that was.
Let's segue for a moment, here.
Sports are life. One should be able to take values and principles from sports life into real life. You can look around, and see this organization probably needs a rebuild, and this one seems to succeed every year. Let's apply this thinking to politics.
The NDP. And its failure to form government in the most recent election. In fact, the NDP was simply devastated in its electoral results, losing dozens of seats, moving from official opposition to third party. At this point, one would be thinking it's time for an NDP rebuild, right? Not so, according to NDP leadership. Let's stay the course, says NDP leadership. Not throw out the baby with the bathwater, and so forth. But that would probably be insane. Let's be honest, here. One can observe past results, and usually predict future results, if the variables remain the same. In this case, if the NDP leadership remains the same, then the next election will probably follow the same course as the previous one. A downward trend. The NDP should probably change leadership. However, the NDP might not. And that would be crazy.

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