I remember when I was a kid my dad told me great stories about Ernie Banks, Minnie Minoso and the Chicago baseball teams of the 1960s. He always said that baseball and life were a lot simpler in those days and that athletes weren’t paid much more than the rest of the population. He and my grandfather could go to a baseball or football game for a little more than a day’s wage, and have a great bonding experience.

Enter the world of modern day athletics — more specifically professional baseball. During the 2001 off-season, professional baseball has seen its salary base skyrocket into levels that once seemed unattainable. The average major leaguer is now pulling in an astounding $1.8 million a year, almost 18 percent higher than in 1999.

The biggest shocker came in December when the Texas Rangers agreed to pay former Seattle Mariners shortstop Alex Rodriguez $252 million over 10 years. For those of you who are way too dependent on your TI-81s, that is about $25 million a season. This is for a guy who throws a ball and hits it with a wooden club. Sounds a little ridiculous, doesn’t it?

Let’s compare these salaries with those of the people who are actually productive members of our society. Firefighters, civil servants who risk their lives every day for the sake of mankind, make an average of $38,168 a year. The average licensed nurse makes an average of $35,724 a year to help save lives.

What nobody seems to realize is that this could be the beginning of the end for professional sports. The larger market teams are eventually going to swallow the small market teams whole.

It’s kind of like a Safeway moving into your town and forcing your friendly grocer out of business. A small market team like the Kansas City Royals will never be able to sign high caliber players like a big market organization, such as the New York Yankees. The current payroll for the Royals is $534,460, while America’s team gives out a whopping $3.6 million a season. How can the Royals, Oakland Athletics or Montreal Expos pull in enough money to pay top-of-the-line athletes when they can’t even come close to the revenue of the Yankees or Atlanta Braves.

This means that if these big-name athletes continue to demand quarter-billion dollar salaries, the small market teams will eventually fold and baseball itself will crumble. Professional franchises are in a race to see who can suck the most green out of the fans’ pockets, with whoever gets to the finish line first surviving. It is like Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory. Only the strongest will survive in a dog-eat-dog situation. The big dogs — New York, Chicago, Atlanta — will eat up the puppies — KC, Montreal, Oakland — and there won’t be any dogs left to play with.

So how do we prevent this madness from continuing? It is a really tough task, but it begins with you and me. Next time you want to spend $30 to get into the ball park and $4.75 for a Miller Lite, cherish the fact that as a result of your splurging, future generations may never witness professional sports as we know them. We need to tell the owners and the athletes that they are playing a kids’ game, and they are exploiting our society for all we are worth. Although watching a man throw a football 75 yards, or hit a baseball 500 feet is amazing, they are still mortal men playing a GAME.

Many parents can’t even take their kids to a baseball game anymore because the prices are way too high. How can a dedicated parent reasonably spend a quarter of their weekly wages by taking their family to watch men play games? This is not easy for the average family to do.

So what is my message through all of this? It’s basically to enjoy professional athletics while you can. Soon, they too will crumble like the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. It would truly be a shame for my kids to be unable to hear about the Kirby Puckett and Ryne Sandberg of my youth.