Baseball: A Marxist Analysis

Jim O'Brien and Nick Thorkelson

This article is from the July/August 2002 issue of Dollars and Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org


issue 242 cover

This article is from the July/August 2002 issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.

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Despite fastballs and double plays, major league baseball games are longer than they used to be. An average game that might have taken two and a half hours in 1978 (when this cartoon first appeared in Radical America magazine) takes around three hours today. Fortunately, players are now compensated fairly for the extra work—the average salary, about $100,000 in 1978, is over $2 million today. The wealthier players once again own their own bats, free and clear.

Baseball: A Marxist Analysis

In 1978, Jim O'Brien was a staff member of the New England Free Press and an editor of Radical America. He now teaches in the College of Public and Community Service of the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
Nick Thorkelson is a painter, cartoonist, and graphic designer, and a longtime contributor to Dollars & Sense. He is the author/artist of the "Comic Strip of Neoliberalism" series that has been appearing in D&S for the past two years. Nick moonlights as a keyboard player in the rhythm and blues band Six of One. You can see more of his work at www.nickthorkelson.com.