Andy Young: Outgrowing a first love

By Andy Young

Nearly anything redeemable about who I am today can be traced to my involvement with baseball. America’s nominal national pastime helped me discover the relationship between hard work and success, acquire a sense of belonging, and learn the significance of being part of something bigger than myself. The social skills I picked up from my participation in the game have been more valuable to me than my ability to hit a curveball ever was.

Okay. Ever would have been. Full disclosure: I never actually learned to consistently hit a curveball.

But even after it became apparent that I lacked the ability to be a professional athlete, my close personal relationship with the game continued. I spent decades immersed in and around it, coaching, umpiring, and working in various capacities for a string of minor league professional teams. And while I never reached my original goal of becoming a major league radio/TV announcer, my journey was a supremely rewarding one. Many of the friends I met along the way have helped me attain the rewarding life my family and I enjoy today.

This year’s World Series between the Dodgers and Blue Jays, which concluded two weeks ago, was one of the most exciting in the game’s long history. That’s what reliable sources reported, anyway. I had to take their word for it, since I didn’t watch even one minute of a single contest.

Part of my rationale for skipping the series: the conscious choice I made some years ago to make my home televisionless. It’s one of the few decisions I’ve never for a moment regretted, since resisting the temptation to sit inertly staring at a two-dimensional rectangle is far easier when no such screens are readily available. But there are other reasons I’ve abstained from watching the World Series for the past two decades or so.

Another justification: I currently hold a full-time job. Each of this year’s games started at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. Two of them ended well after midnight, and another three continued past 11 p.m., an hour at which many of us who wish to remain gainfully employed have retired for the evening.

Fun fact: had I watched every moment of every game of this year’s World Series, it would have cost me 1m533 minutes of time I’d have never gotten back.

But the biggest reason for my tuning out major league baseball is money. This year’s average major league baseball player’s salary exceeded $5,000,000, although that’s somewhat deceiving, skewed by the annual compensation due to megastars like Shohei Ohtani ($70,000,000) and Juan Soto ($51,000,000). The median salary in 2025, a comparatively paltry $1,350,000, is bankrolled largely by stratospheric fees television networks pay for the right to air the games.

I have no quarrel with baseball players making the money they do. Unlike other workers ballplayers have limited available time to ply their trade. Their relatively short careers will probably end by the time they reach their mid-30’s. In contrast, teachers can go on teaching, nurses can continue healing, hairdressers can keep beautifying, and plumbers can continue to plumb at ages twice that of washed-up athletes. Ballplayers are entitled to whatever compensation they can get. Anyone in any field of endeavor who’s offered a seven-figure annual salary would be foolish not to take it.

Similarly, I don’t object to major league baseball team owners reaping huge profits any more than I would anyone else earning a living in their chosen field. Affluent young baseball players and even-wealthier owners have the right to amass all the money they can.

They just won’t get any of it from me. <