I mention this, of course, in light of the two most sensational stories of the last week: President Barack Obama's endorsement of a $500,000-a-year salary cap on CEOs of firms that get federal bailout money, and Manny Ramirez's rejection of a $25 million offer to play Baseball for the Los Angeles Dodgers this summer.

As it happens, the two stories are intricately related. In fact, it can be argued that this whole kerfluffle about excessive corporate salaries is linked inextricably to high salaries in sports, especially Baseball. Hear me out.

In the first place, there is a direct relationship between Manny's contract demands (nobody calls Manny Ramirez anything but "Manny") and the federal bailout. Manny and his agent, Scott Boras, shrewdly have manipulated the market for the 36-year-old slugging left fielder.

First, last summer Manny dogged it in Boston, where he had led the Red Sox to two World Series championships, causing the Red Sox to trade him to the Dodgers, even though they held options on his services for the next two seasons. Boras had just entered the picture, and he would not get paid anything unless Manny got a new contract.

So Manny wound up in Los Angeles for the second half of the season and played spectacularly well, leading the Dodgers to the playoffs and setting himself up for a huge new deal, of which Boras would get a piece.

Boras sneered at the Dodgers' offer of a two-year, $45 million contract, insisting that Manny should get $100 million over four years. If Boras got the standard Baseball agent cut, he'd get $4 million of that. Boras seems to feel that the New York Mets will offer Manny that much, inasmuch as the Mets need a slugging left fielder, even one who is 36 years old, to fill up seats in their new $850 million ballpark.

The ballpark, by the way, is called Citi Field, thanks to a $400 million, 20-year naming rights deal with Citigroup Inc.

Citigroup is one of those banks the government last fall decided was too big to fail. So far, taxpayers have put $45 billion into the company.

As it happens, Vikram Pandit, the CEO of Citigroup, last year was paid $216 million, making him America's highest-paid executive. Only $2.7 million of this was salary, the rest being bonuses, equity and stock options. Executive compensation experts have many shrewd ways to get around the problem of paying people bonuses when they have lousy years.

As far as I can tell, they learned this trick from watching Baseball. In Baseball, guys who have lousy years still get fat contracts, and guys who have great years (i.e., Manny) can shoot for the moon.

Baseball's salary boom started in 1969, when Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood decided he didn't want to be traded to Philadelphia and challenged Baseball's reserve clause in court. He sacrificed his career for a principle, losing his case but winning the war.

In 1975, an arbitrator struck down the reserve clause and Baseball players began to be able to sell their services to the highest bidders. Pitcher Jim "Catfish" Hunter signed a breathtaking five-year, $3.25 million deal to move from the cheapskate Oakland A's to the New York Yankees, and salaries ever since have been going nowhere but up.

According to a study of executive compensation done in 1999 by Kevin Murphy of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, "the median cash compensation paid to S&P 500 [Standard & Poor's index of the 500 top-valued public companies] CEOs has more than doubled since 1970 (in 1996-constant dollars] and median total realized compensation, including gains from exercising stock options, has nearly quadrupled."

This is precisely the 30-year post-Curt Flood time frame, 1970-2000, in which Major League Baseball's annual average salary went from $29,303 to just shy of $2 million. Last year, the average salary topped $3 million.

Are you telling me this is a coincidence? I think not. CEOs read the sports pages, too, and beginning in 1975, they decided if Catfish Hunter was going to get a $1 million bonus and a huge raise, they should even bigger bonuses and salaries. After all, ballplayers were dumb jocks playing a game, and they were titans of industry.

Executives decided that, just like ballplayers, they had valuable skills that were in limited supply. This premise was bogus, but since the people making the decision about salaries were other executives, they happily bought into it.

So in a way, the whole executive pay thing is Curt Flood's fault. I got to know him a little bit before his death in 1997. I think he'd be amused.