“It is a sort of compliment,” admitted Joe. “They must feel pretty sure there’s something in me to bind themselves to pay that salary for so long a time. I didn’t really expect more than a one-year contract. Of course there’s another side to it. If I did especially well this first year, perhaps they figure I’d get a swelled head and hold them up for a big increase next year. As it is, no matter how well I do, I can’t get any more salary until the three-year period is up.
“Then too,” he went on, as he passed his plate for another helping, “there’s been a good deal of talk lately about this third big league. They’re awfully anxious to get star players so as to draw the public from the start, and the only way they can get them is to coax them away from the National or the American League. To do that they’ll have to offer enormous salaries. If I were bound for one year and the new league wanted me, they might try to get me to promise to join them as soon as my year was up. But with a three-year contract holding me, McRae won’t have to worry.”
“Those clubs must be awfully rich to tie themselves up for such an amount of money,” remarked Mrs. Matson. “Suppose a player lost his skill. Would they have to go on paying him just the same?”
“Not by a jugful,” laughed Joe. “There’s a little joker in the contract that permits the club to release a player on ten days’ notice.”
“But you can’t quit them on ten days’ notice!” exclaimed Clara. “It doesn’t seem to me that that’s fair.”
“It isn’t fair on the face of it,” admitted Joe, “but as a matter of fact, it works out pretty well in practice. In the first place, the club is crazy to get hold of good players and is only too anxious to keep them if they behave themselves and play the game. If a player gets a ten days’ notice, it’s usually because he deserves it. The club has to have some protection against careless or drunken or dissipated players, and the ten days’ notice gives it to them.
“Take it altogether, the players get a square deal,” he concluded. “They get bigger salaries than almost any of them could command in any other walk of life. They travel in Pullman cars with every luxury that the richest passenger can command. They dine and sleep in the finest hotels in the country. When they’re on the road, all their expenses are paid by the club, so that their salaries are pure velvet. Nearly half the year they have to themselves, and don’t have to work at all unless they want to. During their playing days they have plenty of time to study and prepare themselves for some profession later on. Lots of them become lawyers or dentists or prosperous business men. Some of them go on the stage and make more in a month than the average man can make in a year. Hughson of the New Yorks opened an insurance office one winter and people fairly fell over each other to do business with him. They just wanted to tell their friends that they had done business with the great Hughson.
“Oh, we poor baseball ‘slaves’ are doing pretty well, thank you,” Joe ended, with a laugh, as his hand tightened on the contract and the crisp blue check that had come with it.