PEOPLE

CONTENTS:

• USA Today Baseball Salaries
• Business Week Special Report: Executive Pay
• America's Fastest-Growing Small Companies

USA TODAY BASEBALL SALARIES

Fall is in the air and it's time for playoffs. The Cubs hhave us believing in miracles. Grab a hot dog and let's talk baseball.

What sets USA Today's site apart from other listings of baseball salaries is the historical data. There's no better way to chart the rise and fall of a baseball player's career than tracking salary, watching it climb into the millions, then suddenly drop off to a measly six-figures. What happened . . . was it an injury? Or just old age (nearing 30)?

If your prospects happen to play ball and their salaries are in that stellar territory, strike fast.

You can browse through lists of names by clicking on a letter of the alphabet. Or, if you know your slugger, you can search by name. You can also search by team or by year (back to 1988). Under year, you can sort teams by total payroll or median salary or, by clicking on Top 25, you can bring up a list of the 25 highest-paid players from that year.

http://asp.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/salaries/default.aspx

BUSINESS WEEK SPECIAL REPORT: EXECUTIVE PAY

From Business Week, here's an article about CEO pay in 2002. Options and bonuses were gutted, bringing CEO pay back to about where it was in 1996. The highest-paid exec in 2002 brought home $194.9 million, down from Oracle CEO Lawrence Ellison's staggering $706.1 million the previous year (how do they fit all those zeros on a paycheck?).

Only two broke the $100 million mark, down from seven. However, for those of you who like statistics, even though average pay declined by a third, median pay rose by 5.9 percent.

Click on The Top Paid Executives and 10 Who Aren't CEOs for a chart showing salaries and bonuses.

Click on the Executive Compensation Scorecard, which will open a .pdf file (you will need the free Adobe Acrobat program) examining how closely executive pay matched company performance.

And, click on Giving Something Back to discover those CEOs who actually turned down options, bonuses and pay.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_16/b3829002.htm

AMERICA'S FASTEST-GROWING SMALL COMPANIES

Sometimes, it pays to think smaller.

Fortune Magazine brings you The FSB 100, a recently published list of the fastest-growing small companies in the U.S. The wealthiest 25 executives of those companies (calculated by the value of insider holdings) are shown on the Web site, along with their stock holdings. Click on Profiles: The Front-Runners for interviews with these leaders.

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/Fsb100/richest

Pam Patton

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