What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

by Michael J. Sandel

In 1992, Mickey Mantle earned a reported $2.75 million to autograph twenty thousand baseballs and make personal appearances, more money than he made during his entire playing career with the Yankees.

From Yankee Stadium in New York to Candlestick Park in San Francisco, sports stadiums are the cathedrals of our civil religion, public spaces that gather people from different walks of life in rituals of loss and hope, profanity and prayer.24

for most of the twentieth century, ballparks were places where corporate executives sat side by side with blue-collar workers, where everyone waited in the same lines to buy hot dogs or beer, and where rich and poor alike got wet if it rained.

The advent of skybox suites high above the field of play has separated the affluent and the privileged from the common folk in the stands below.

“Skyboxes, for all their cozy frivolity,” wrote Jonathan Cohn, “speak to an essential flaw in American social life: the elite’s eagerness, even desperation, to separate itself from the rest of the crowd …

Texas newspaper called skyboxes “the sporting equivalent of gated communities,” which enable wealthy occupants “to segregate themselves from the rest of the public.”

The Boston Red Sox have a waiting list for the forty suites at Fenway Park, which cost up to $350,000 per season.

The federal tax code gives those who use college stadium skyboxes a special tax break, allowing buyers of the luxury suites to deduct 80 percent of the cost as a charitable contribution to the university.