Sports headlines lately have been full of some amazing figures.
Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino will have to struggle by on just $25 million over five years.And he's probably jealous. The Yankees will pay Danny Tartabull $27 million over the next five years.
And he's probably jealous, looking at Bobby Bonilla's five-year, $29 million contract with the Mets.
Meanwhile, a Japanese-led group has bid $100 million for the Seattle Mariners.
Where's the money coming from? Part of it obviously comes through ticket sales. But most of it is from TV rights fees.
There is, however, a dark cloud on the horizon for pro sports franchises. The broadcast networks are losing a fortune on pro football and baseball, and they plan to, if not cut off, at least slow down the flow of cash.
Working for cost-conscious General Electric, which owns NBC, NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol has been under pressure to cut costs. He said that NBC Sports has cut back from 186 to 112 employees in three years, "but the bottom line is, 91 percent of our costs are sports rights. If they don't come down, we get out."
Ebersol expressed considerable concern about the future of major league baseball and NFL football on the broadcast networks.
"The real goal of any responsible sports programmer in the next 18 to 24 months will be to maintain free, over-the-air telecasts of major sports events," Ebersol said. "Now, I kid about it a lot but I mean it. I think that the success we have in that area will probably be in direct proportion to how far (CBS Sports President) Neal Pilson is kept away from (CBS Chairman) Larry Tisch's personal checking account."
Ebersol opined that both NBC and ABC have been "responsible" when it comes to rights fees, but "we all got out at the edge in the last bidding. CBS got way too far out there. We made a lot of bids based on break-even, and then when the recession hit us we found ourselves in a loss position.
"It will never happen again. It will simply never happen again."
As for the top executives at CBS, they'll admit to overpaying for both football and baseball. That network spent more than $1 billion on a four-year baseball contract and has already written off more than $450 million losses on the deal.
"If we hadn't had sports, we'd have been embarrassingly wealthy," said CBS Broadcast Group President Howard Stringer.
When CBS spent all that money on baseball and football, it was because the network's prime time schedule was a disaster - a weak third in the ratings race.
"The sporting events did carry us on golden wings during a period when we couldn't get arrested," Stringer said. "And for that, we're grateful."
But, with the help of those contracts, CBS is now No. 1 in prime time. (And it would be No. 1 or a close No. 2 without baseball, the Super Bowl and the upcoming Winter Olympics.) CBS simply doesn't need sports as badly now.
"For us, those sports contracts at the time generated life and excitement in a network which many were describing as moribund. 'Tain't moribund now," Stringer said. "And if this economy continues this way, we will obviously discuss every sports contract and every other contract in light of the new realities."
Both the major league baseball and NFL television contracts expire after the 1993 seasons. And franchise owners are already bracing for a decline in fees.
Currently, the combined CBS/ESPN contribution to major league baseball comes out to about $14 million per team. Commissioner Fay Vincent has advised teams to expect that to drop to about $9 million per team when a new contract is negotiated, but Ebersol believes that's overly optimistic.
"I wouldn't see us even being interested unless it were at $6 (million) or $7 million combined from broadcast and cable," he said.
Making the baseball owners' position even weaker is the success NBC has found programming against the playoffs and the World Series since losing baseball to CBS. NBC has counter-programmed with highly rated, female-oriented made-for-TV movies.
"At the same time they're winning in the ratings, they're winning in the pocketbook. . . . You'd have to ask (NBC President and CEO) Bob (Wright) now whether he'd even let me out the door with any money when this is an area where we're so successful," Ebersol said.
NFL owners won't find any increase in their pocketbooks, either.
"There'll be absolutely no hike from the National Broadcasting Company," Ebersol said. "I mean, we've been fairly out front about the fact that in the first two years of this contract, we've lost between $40 (million) and $50 million."
ABC and CBS have both also admitted to NFL-related losses totaling tens of millions of dollars. TNT and ESPN, on the other hand, haven't lost money on their limited football ventures.
"Both cable partners have indicated publicly . . . that because of their ability to double-dip with sub(scriber)-fees set aside for NFL games that they both break even or make a little profit," Ebersol said. "So I assume the NFL would probably attempt to soak them."
That doesn't, however, mean that major sports franchises are headed for cable. For one thing, major sports leagues operate under exemptions to anti-trust legislation, and Congress would certainly step in if the World Series or the Super Bowl switched to cable.
And for another, cable's sports contracts are insignificant compared to those of the networks.
"The good news is that I don't think there are any cable companies that want to assume these sports rights obligations," Wright said. "I don't see any appetite at all on the part of cable operators, especially in view of potential government regulations limiting the prices they can charge for services. They last thing they want to do is to inherit a $900-million package that isn't going to get them any more viewers."
Obviously, none of this is going to make the owners of the sports team particularly happy.
"There are quite a few football teams that look at themselves as being worth between $150 (million) and $200 million," Ebersol said. "The worth of those franchises is primarily built on the money that we've been paying them. It's not that the value of those players is even close to $50 million. It's based on what we're giving them. So the value of those franchises will come down by a third or more."
What will all this mean to the viewer? Well, regular-season baseball games on the broadcast networks will probably disappear altogether. (There were only a dozen on CBS last year.) Between all the games offered on cable and local stations, there isn't much of an audience left for the networks.
Chances are that more, but not all, of the regular season NFL games will move over to cable. And Ebersol is probably right - the NFL will try to increase its income from cable.
As for the effects on baseball owners, some of the more recent franchise buyers will rue how much they overpaid.
And as for the players, Marino, Tartabull and Bonilla might just have to make due with $2 million or $3 million a year instead of $5 million or $6 million.