ve baseball teams with the highest payrolls to pay a tax that helped to keep the playing field level between large and small market teams. However, with no type of salary control in use by MLB each player can receive as much money as an owner is willing to pay as evidenced by Alex Rodriguezs huge salary. The NFL salary cap has been lauded as the sole reason that the NFL is so competitive and a different champion seems to emerge every year, however in baseball the same teams are near the top every year and it is no coincidence that the New York Yankees have won the World Series the last few years and they also have the largest payroll. A large market team such as the Yankees can afford to overpay players because they enjoy a bigger gate and larger television revenues than a team like the Montreal Expos. In the NFL all the money is disbursed equally and the salary cap helps to keep all teams competitive. Therefore, the league with the highest player salaries is not necessarily the league that offers the most competitive product. The only lesson to be learned here is that if you have an athletically gifted child you may want to direct that child towards baseball to maximize his/her payday. Athlete perception in both sports plays a large part in attendance, television revenue, ticket costs, and several other areas within the NFL and MLB. Currently the players in the NFL are regarded as the most dangerous and out of control athletes. The recent dramas involving O.J. Simpson, Ray Carruth, and Ray Lewis have given the NFL a serious black mark among the fans. While baseball players are generally seen as a greedy bunch the football player is now seen as a criminal with little or no regard for the law. Domestic violence has now unfortunately become part of the NFL and MLB mainstream with several incidents documented in both leagues each year, yet the fans do not even seem to care about these incidents but rather focus on the more th...
