Kazuhiro Sasaki forfeits final year of $10MM/year, chooses family over career/money

SF Chron: What did you learn from hanging around pampered major leaguers?

Michael Lewis: The way people make a fetish out of money. A baseball player who is very happy with his family in Cleveland and is offered $50 million to stay with the Cleveland Indians or $60 million to go play for the Philadelphia Phillies will uproot his family, put his happiness in jeopardy and go to an uncertain situation for the extra $10 million that he's never going to use anyway.

I still haven't read Moneyball.

One thing I think is so funny about baseball players, their union and money is how they are constantly angry that salarys are not going up. The games revenues have nose dived, tv ratings are in the tank, attendance is down for most teams, money has killed the competitive balence of the league and there are bunches of stars that don't want anything to do with anything off the field and marketing the game; yet they want a raise. MLB is filled with more crap players making big money than any other pro sport.

Between the idiot owners and clueless players there is a big generation gap with baseball fans. Give it another twenty years and baseball could become a minor sport.

anyone remember the onion headline about the first iraq war? something along the lines of "bottom 10% of class of 1990 deployed to iraq"? that about sums it up.

Notable Texas Rangers whom A-Rod played with and their age differential to A-Rod's in years:

Ivan Rodriguez +4
Rafael Palmeiro +11
Ruben Sierra +9
Andres Galarraga +14
Carl Everett +5
Juan Gonzalez +6

Chan Ho Park +3
Kenny Rogers +11
Ismael Valdes +4

Of course, A-Rod manages to sound like a well-spoken short-minded whiny putz every time he opens his mouth. Weren't all the reports preceeding A-Rod's contract signing of him getting an earful from Hicks & Co. about Blalock & Texeira & all the young kids they had, AND HIM BEING EXCITED ABOUT THAT? The more he talks about his "terrible" Texas experience, it makes me think Da Rod was either horrifically naive & delusional when it came to what the Rangers promised him, or was totally oblivious & didn't give enough of a damn to research the team that dropped a quarter of a billion dollars on his plate. It doesn't take microscopes to see why Texas stunk these past 3 years.

And the irony is that the kiddie corps is having more on-field success than the highly paid vets had. A-Rod just constantly puts his foot in his mouth.