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Alex Rodriguez: The 25-Million Dollar Man

© Roy Pickering

Question: What would you be able to do if someone paid you $25.2 million a year to play baseball? Answer: You'd be able to say - "Hi, my name is Alex Rodriguez." As Puff Daddy once proclaimed - "It's all about the Benjamins." But a few pieces of paper featuring Mr. Franklin's face is just chump change to the modern day elite sportsman. To keep from running out of paper, the treasury department may want to consider issuing a million dollar bill so athletes like Alex, Tiger and Shaq will be able to more conveniently cash their paychecks.

There is no denying that Rodriguez is a marquee player, and there was never a doubt that as a much coveted 25-year old free agent, he was in the driver's seat and would make a killing no matter where he went. When the killing turned out to be $252 million for 10 years, however, the general reaction was one of shock, and in some cases, of genuine dismay. It seems like only yesterday when Steve Austin (a.k.a. The Bionic Man) was considered to be a mighty expensive piece of property at a value of $6M. Perhaps instead of going on missions for the government, Steve should have been working on fielding grounders and batting for power against lefthanders.

If you go no further than the numbers, the reasons to submit to Alex Rodriguez' ransom demands, excuse me, I meant to say his contractual demands, were sufficient on their own. Since coming into the Major Leagues seven years ago at the age of 18, he has hit 189 homeruns, knocked in 595 RBI's, and has a .309 career average. At the position of shortstop, no offense intended to Derek Jeter and his supporters, Alex is considered by many to be in a league of his own. But a quarter of a billion dollars league? Nobody was quite ready for that. Nobody, that is, except for Alex and his agent Scott Boras.

Looking beyond the numbers, one sees that Rodriguez is a marketer's dream. He is handsome, single, young, reasonably eloquent, clean living, hard working, a true role model. In other words, the complete package. This is why the Texas Rangers owner, Tom Hicks, was willing to make such a sizeable investment. At best, it will result in multiple championships and a team that is the envy of the league. The formula of lavish spending to secure the top of the talent pool has certainly worked well enough for his counterpart, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. The Yankees' bottomless financial resources are due in large part to the television deal they struck with the MSG Network. Now that the Rangers have a comparable deal, one Hicks negotiated with Fox Sports Southwest by proposing to create a rival network if necessary to broadcast Rangers games, Rodriguez became affordable at just about any price.