(not Cliff Lee)
After leaving some $30 million Yankee dollars on the table in order to return to the Phillies for a mere $120 million pact over 5 years, starter Cliff Lee, “is being held up by some as a shining example of someone not motivated by greed,” sneers the AP’s Tim Dahlberg. “I’m not picking on Lee…but I’m also not going to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize,” continues Dahlberg, who then proceeds to, well, pick on Lee.
For what Lee will make to pitch one game, Save The Children -which is active in 120 countries -could help save the lives of 10,000 malnourished children by providing them with specially formulated peanut paste for eight weeks so they gain weight and get stronger.
For what he will be paid to pitch just one inning, the charity could buy 4,000 newborn care packages to help prevent infants from dying within the first 24 hours of birth.
For the money Lee makes to get one out, a complete school could be built in Mali, a country in Western Africa that is one of the poorest in the world. Each school can be built for $42,000 including three classrooms, latrines for boys and girls, and books.
“We can educate a girl for an entire year for $65,” Loehr said. “It takes so little to be able to bring education to the world’s poorest children.”
Spend Lee’s money closer to home and the left-behind $30 million could provide healthy snacks for a half million kids living in poverty in the United States.
That Lee is making an obscene amount of money is impossible to argue…and almost as useless to harp on. If Lee has an moral obligation to turn over some portion of salary to the globe’s neediest, what about the owners of the Philadelphia Phillies, whose business model presumably provides for some kind of profit over the next 5 seasons? What have Alex Rodriguez, Bud Selig, Barry Zito or Wily Mo Penaa done recently to address famine relief?