No, I didn't think they were truly worth that kind of money. However, I made an eerily prophetic comparison at the time. I argued that Dwight Gooden, my hero as a New York Mets fan, and his right arm had an intrinsic economic value due to supply and demand. There was a limited supply of pitching arms that could throw an intimidating 90-plus mile per hour fastball and a curveball that dropped out of the sky on cue, leaving batters weak-kneed and embarrassed. At the same time, the demand for this type of arm was skyrocketing. Everyone salivated over Mr. Gooden's talent; everybody wanted one. Expanding TV revenues and gate receipts (this was all before the idiotic 1994 strike that cancelled the playoffs and World Series, ripping the hearts out of many baseball fans) made money available to pay for this want. Simple supply and demand shows that a talent like this will get paid a lot of money. (It doesn't explain other salaries in the sports world, however. Some can only be explained by the simple fact that some owners are stupid.)

On the other hand - this is where my comparison was strangely prescient - corporate CEO's were being paid outrageous sums. I heard recently that, at the time I made these unheeded arguments, CEO's were paid an average of 42 times that of the average worker, while today the multiplier is 500. So CEO's weren't making the bags of cash they are currently "earning." However, many were making in excess of the magical one million dollar level. I argued that CEO's didn't have any truly intrinsic value, like Mr. Gooden and his golden right arm. No, many people could learn the management and leadership skills needed to be a successful CEO. Therefore, supply was high and growing higher as more eager students graduated from business schools, hoping to become the next great corporate leader. Apparently, these corporate climbers were not learning business ethics at school, but that's a different discussion. The point is that no economic model of supply and demand could explain why a CEO should be making millions of dollars.

Nobody took this argument very seriously. Even I wasn't convinced. However, the fiscal scandals of the past year are showing that maybe I was on to something. It seems like every day another $100 million CEO comes forward to admit that they misled their shareholders or simply mismanaged their company to ruin. These CEO's are either unethical or incompetent. They definitely aren't worth their exorbitant salaries and stock-option packages.

That's where we find the holes in my argument. First, maybe it really is difficult to find a good CEO for a major corporation. Maybe those thousands of MBA graduates newly minted each year can be equated to the countless high school athletes who never make it to the professional leagues, never make the big bucks. The failings of a Kenneth Lay or a Bernie Ebbers may simply show that the supply of great CEO's is very low, but the demand in our capitalistic culture is astronomically high. The divide may be so great, in fact, that companies gamble gobs of money on the first person they find who has even a speck of potential to be a great leader. It appears a number of these gambles backfired.

The second crack in my long-held theory involves the athletes. Salaries today like the $252 million Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers is to be paid over the next 20 years cannot be based on logically applied supply and demand. The value of the entire Texas Rangers franchise is approximately $300 million. How can one player be worth almost as much as an entire team? Also, my New York Mets have one of the five highest paid rosters in baseball this season. Their pathetic results show you that they didn't pay the right price for their players; they didn't follow simple supply and demand. Basically, their corporate leadership is incompetent. And even Dwight Gooden's promise evaporated after just a few years of excellence, his other intrinsic weaknesses overcoming his immense talent.

So, Nostradamus I'm not. But I would still like my friends who mocked my illogical arguments to admit that I was on to something. Who knows, if I worked for the SEC, maybe we could have averted this recent wave of corporate scandals. More likely, as commissioner of baseball, I would have led the league to the brink of another player's strike or owner's lockout, or even - god forbid - contraction of some beloved franchises. Oh wait, Bud Selig already did that. Maybe I am management material!