Just in time for the upcoming trial in which Attorney General Cuomo will try to prove Eliot Spitzer’s old case against Richard Grasso comes news of some compensation figures that put the $187 million payout for the former chief of the New York Stock Exchange in context. The commissioner of Major League Baseball, Bud Selig, earned $14.5 million in the year ended October 2005, according to Sports-Business Journal, which also reported that Paul Tagliabue earned $11.6 million during the year ended March 2003, in which he served as commissioner of the National Football League. Both football and baseball are not-for-profit associations similar in many ways to the stock exchange, though the leagues deal with smaller sums of money than does the exchange. And Mr. Grasso’s payout included years of deferred compensation and retirement funds, making them hard to compare directly with the sports executives’ one-year pay figures.

Mr. Spitzer has argued that Mr. Grasso’s compensation was unreasonable. But the payouts for executives of some of the company’s listed on the stock exchange dwarf Mr. Grasso’s package. Just the other day the Wall Street Journal reported on a $416.3 million payday for the chairman of NYSE-listed Occidental Petroleum Corp., Ray Irani. Reported the Journal, “Dr. Irani, 72 years old, may have more large paydays ahead. Occidental disclosed additional supplemental retirement funds and deferred-compensation plans valued at $124 million.” The New York Stock Exchange — not its listed companies put together, but the stock exchange itself, which is now a publicly traded company — yesterday closed with a market capitalization of more than $15 billion. In a city in which non-profit hospital executives routinely earn $2 million to $5 million a year and in which executives of stock-exchange seatholders earn $40 million or $50 million a year, it may be possible to prove in court that Mr. Grasso’s compensation was unreasonable, but it sure won’t be an open-and-shut case.