I'm just as thrilled as the next guy that the Brewers signed Jeff Suppan on the free agent market. He's got a good reputation and will clearly be a good addition to the pitching staff.

But, he's also an example of the madness in professional sports.

Suppan has a career record of 106-101. He has started 301 games and has finished 15. He has a career 4.60 earned run average. Not bad. But, the Brewers are paying him $42 million over four years.

And, it's clearly not just the Brewers who are crazed. They almost seem sane compared to other teams. The average baseball salary went up 9 % this year to $2,699,292. That's the average salary. It's likely that the average salary will climb to more than $3 million this coming season.

Bob DuPuy, the chief operating officer for baseball says that the increased average "is a reflection of the level of the talent on the field." I almost hope he was joking when he said that. I really hope that the man next in line behind Bud Selig has better sense than to actually believe that these salaries are so high because the players are so good.

There are eleven $100 million contracts in baseball, including the three newest: Alfonso Soriano ($136 million), Vernon Wells ($126 million) and Carlos Lee ($100 million).

But Major League Baseball seems like a piker when compared to the NBA, where the average salary approaches $5 million a year. Ridiculous? Hear this: the New York Knicks are paying Allan Houston, Jalen Rose, Maurice Taylor, Shandon Anderson and Jerome Williams a total of $61,700,000 this year.

AND NOT ONE OF THEM IS EVEN ON THE TEAM.

Ninety-three golfers made more than a million dollars last year, for God's sake. Golfers!

I think if the Gallup people took a poll, 100 out of 100 people would say that pro sports salaries are too high. The same number would say those salaries disgusted them.

I've been giving a lot of thought to what, if anything, can be done about this madness. How can we, as fans, help return the world of professional sports to a place where athletes get paid, but they don't play for the money. They play because they want to and they are the best at what they do.

I know we feel kind of helpless. How can we possibly go up against the triumvirate of players unions, wealthy owners and television networks? I may not have an answer, but I do have an idea.

Let's take a leaf from the Howard Dean book of raising money. The former presidential candidate made a huge impact using the Internet to raise funds before his campaign crashed in the dregs of a pained wail in Iowa. He showed that you can use the Internet to build a grassroots movement.

I say let's start a grassroots movement to support minor league sports.

Let's focus on the Admirals and the Wave. Let's make every game a sellout. Let's go to high school games, which are normally more fun than a barrel of drunken monkeys. Let's watch the UWM women's volleyball team and the Marquette club rugby team. Let's get entrepreneurs to open concession stands at reasonable prices where stands don't exist. Let's patronize those stands so they make a profit. A nice profit. Not an obscene profit, but a nice profit.

Let's make summer drives to Appleton and Beloit to watch minor league baseball teams play. Let's trudge out to the State Amateur golf tournament.

Let's get the newspapers to stop covering pro games. Put the scores in the scoreboard section. Let's focus on athletes who ride bikes and hit badminton birdies and shoot free throws with diligence.

I'm not going to pretend this is going to be easy. It will take sacrifice and a lot of work. But after a few years of not going to the professional games they might get the hint. We don't care if they make money. We just don't want them to seem like pigs at the trough we keep filling up.

I know there are skeptics out there who don't think this will work. Many of these same people had a similar reaction about three years ago.

"Yeah, right," they said. "Poker as a television sport? Never going to work."