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Baseball's back again it keeps turning up, like a bad penny (not Brad Penny) or a strain of mutant cicadas that return every spring.

USA Today ran a spread last week on baseball salaries, a feature that also turns up every spring and gets readers' blood boiling and puts them in the mood to resent baseball players through another long season.

Personally, I don't begrudge Mr. Ballplayer anything he can get. The life of a Major League player may look like a rose garden, but there's a lot more to it than meets the eye.

To begin with, players don't just saunter out to the field, play the game and go home. They have to be at the ballpark early, for motivational meetings (called "pep talks") and everybody knows how dreary those can be and for batting and fielding practice, during which they can get all sweaty and feel like they have to take a shower before the game even starts.

After the game, players, especially the good ones, have to dodge interviews and autograph seekers on their way to the parking lot or the stadium bar.

Then there are the games. When a player is in the field he must constantly be making critical decisions, such as how to play a particular batter and whether to stand with his weight on his right side or his left, to keep his legs from going to sleep.

In the dugout, in-between turns at bat, the player must keep himself from going to sleep. This can be dicey, as managers frown on activities like card playing or bringing a TV from home, so players have to entertain themselves by telling jokes, watching people in the stands or spitting tobacco on each other's shoes.

Then, although there are equipment people to handle the player's gear before and after games or when the team is traveling, he has to keep up with his own glove and bat during games. Other things he has to remember are the number of outs in the inning, the meaning of all the third-base coach's gestures, and where his car is parked when he leaves the stadium bar.

Being on the road is the worst part of all. Flying to major cities in a private plane, staying in luxury hotels and eating in fancy restaurants can be OK for a while, but then the awful emptiness and monotony of it sets in. Since most games are played at night, players have nothing to do all day but lie around watching TV, and we all know how dreadful daytime TV is.

Above all, what makes the life of a ballplayer so hard are the fans. Mr. Average Joe, just because he forks over three or four hundred bucks for a night at the park with his wife and kids, thinks he has the right to criticize the player's performance or expect him to sign an autograph. (Players, believe it or not, used to sign autographs for free, but now they have recourse to shows, where fans must keep their proper distance, wait in line, and pay a reasonable price, say $75 or $100, for their signature.)

Seriously: Even at the cartoonish salaries baseball players are pulling down, I'm sure none of them feel they're even a bit overpaid. After all, they have to undergo daily job evaluations, overcome the assumption they're cheating if they excel, and live with the knowledge that almost everyone else feels they're paid way too much - even as they file, lemming-like, into the ballparks to watch them work.

Learn more about this author, Paul Erland.
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