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Alex Rodriguez and Madonna -- sure, why not? Andrea Jaeger says she threw a Wimbledon final because her dad torqued her off -- makes perfect sense. A two-star general with no refereeing experience getting the job running the NBA referees -- a brilliant stroke.
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| The Brewers beat out the big boys to land the big fish. (AP) |
CC Sabathia, the most coveted prize in all of baseball, goes to Milwaukee. Yes, that Milwaukee. The Brewers. Honest.
Not the Yankees, or the Red Sox, or the Mets, or the Cubs, or the White Sox, or the Tigers, or the Angels. The Brewers. Now what the hell happened to the power of money in this country that something like this can happen?
I'll tell you what happened. The economy. Fuel costs. The auto industry. Real estate. Layoffs. All of a sudden we live in a world where the Canadian dollar kicks the American dollar square in the nethers, the hoi are meeting the polloi head on, and our system of stratified living, where the rich get everything they want and then steal from the poor for snicks and giggles, is being destroyed.
Look, we know the logic here. The Brewers have more AA talent than the Nationals have ... well, anything. The Indians need minor league bodies and have the best asset in the game. It makes perfect sense on every logical level.
But the Brewers have not historically shopped in this part of the store. Their last acquisition of this import was ... well, hell, it might have been taking Jim Bouton in the 1968 Seattle Pilots expansion draft and helping midwife Ball Four. But they didn't know it at the time.
This time, they had the most toys. A team that traditionally treated money like it was the oxygen sensor in a space capsule and opted out of big deals because the price, either in cash, humans or future contracts, was always too rich for their blood. They were neither buyers nor even renters. What they were, frankly, were bitchers about the free market and how unfair it was to the ones who just tried to get by.
Like them.
And now, they have C.C. Sabathia. And they didn't have to get into a bidding war with anyone to get him. And they did it so that the Cubs and Cardinals wouldn't get too far away from them. They acted, for lack of a better explanation, like one of the Big Boys.
To which we can only say, "Well, I'll be damned."
The Brewers' payroll was as low as $27 million four years ago, and didn't get beyond $50 million for the first time until two years ago, according to Cot's Baseball Contracts -- your last word in financial anal retention -- and Baseball Reference -- your last word in most other forms of anal retention. In other words, the Brewers under Bud Selig weren't players. The Brewers under Mark Attanasio are, at least for the first time.
More importantly, though, we saw a big-name player get past the big spenders without as much as a mean-mouthing from their never-satisfied fans or medioids. Hank Steinbrenner was too busy yelling at the employees, Fred Wilpon was still wondering what happened to Willie Randolph, the Red Sox were wondering if Sabathia, who is as big as David Ortiz, wouldn't rather be a DH, and the Cubs are part of the Great Tribune Corp. Garage Sale, and unprepared to take on more weight in Year C.
