If you’re a conscious baseball fan, you know by now that the Boston Red Sox signed David Price to a seven-year, $217 million contract, making the lefty the highest-paid pitcher ever and tying him with Miguel Cabrera as the highest-paid player of all time by average annual value. And you have seen and heard and read smart work from smart people suggesting that huge free-agent contracts for pitchers rarely work out and that the Red Sox will come to regret committing so much money to the 2015 AL Cy Young runner-up.

And look: If we’re considering the amount of money Price will make relative to his peers and based on how much value he will provide the Red Sox against the portion of their payroll he will command over the next seven years, sure, there’s a reasonable case to be made that they gave him too much money. But know this much: David Price is not overpaid.

Before the Dodgers made Zack Greinke the highest-paid pitcher in terms of average annual value in Dec. 2012, a NESN report said, “The figures attached to Greinke are absolutely absurd, and any team taking him on for such a contract is being foolish to the point of recklessness.” LA Observed said he wasn’t worth the $147 million contract he received, and the Huffington Post ranked his signing among the worst of the offseason. And they were hardly alone.

Three years later, Greinke opted out of the contract many thought gave him way too much money because he now stands to make way more money on another free-agent deal. Certainly Greinke outperformed expectations with the Dodgers, but his opting out reflects the ever-changing reality of the baseball marketplace.

Zack Greinke (USA TODAY Sports Images)

Simply put, teams just have way, way more money to throw around now than they ever did before. Every single year, it seems, we’re stunned by how much money clubs are willing to shell out for the biggest names on the open market. The idea of paying an older version of David Price $31 million a year from 2019-2022 sounds ridiculous to us now, but that’s only because we haven’t yet seen the contracts his colleagues will sign between now and then. If Price stays healthy for the next three seasons, there’s a reasonable chance he, too, will opt out of the final years of his deal for an even bigger free-agent windfall.

Before the 2015 season, Nathaniel Grow at Fangraphs.com dove into baseball’s finances and reached a stunning conclusion:

Since 1995, MLB’s overall league revenues have increased nearly 650%, going from around $1.4 billion to over $9 billion in 2014. During that same time period, though, MLB payrolls have only increased by around 378%, from roughly $925 million in 1995 to just under $3.5 billion last year….

After peaking at a little more than 56% in 2002, today MLB player salaries account for less than 40% of league revenues, a decline of nearly 33% in just 12 years. As a result, player payroll today accounts for just over 38% of MLB’s total revenues, a figure that just ten years ago would have been unimaginably low.

Grow’s entire piece is required reading for anyone wringing his hands over MLB player salaries. Yes, big-ticket free-agent contracts have grown, but not nearly enough to match teams’ revenues. Players make more money than they did 20 years ago, but owners make way, way more money than they did 20 years ago. If anything, it’s not that Price is overpaid, but that every other baseball player is underpaid.

Like all professional baseball players, Price is an entertainer, and his value is dictated by what we’re all willing to pay to watch him perform, whether in person or on television. And the people running the Red Sox — and the 29 other baseball teams, for that matter — are no dummies: They’ll pay David Price $31 million dollars a year because they expect he’ll help them earn far more than that over the course of his contract, regardless of how his salary and production stack up to those of the other players in the league.

And if that’s not enough to convince you, consider this: Bon Jovi made $82 million in 2014, and Bon Jovi is terrible. David Price is so much better than Bon Jovi.