Twelve years, $360 million…

…I’ll say this for Alex Rodriguez and his agent Scott Boras – they’ve got balls…

I guess the ten-year, $252 million dollars the erstwhile Yankee third baseman is making right now just doesn’t cut the mustard. For six years now A-Rod has been the recipient of the largest contract in sports history, but clearly when you just got finished hitting 54 home runs and driving in 158 runs you get to feeling a little under-valued.

If you are like me then your initial response to hearing that this is what A-Rod and Boras will be asking when he decides to opt out of his current largesse was: “FUCK YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON YOU CONCEITED, SELF-ABSORBED ASS-HOLE!!!” I’m not unsympathetic to A-Rod because of the way hard-to-please New Yorkers treat him, but under the circumstances it’s a little justified.

For what he’s making you’d like to see A-Rod at least put the ball in play in the late innings with runners in scoring position and the Yanks down by two or less runs. And you’d sure like to see him do it in the playoffs. That he does neither and never has no matter where he’s played speaks volumes about his value as a guy who gets it done at nut-crunching time. Instead, A-Rod does get a great deal of hits when the Yankees are either down by 6 runs or up by six runs. That doesn’t exactly scream that he is a pressure player.

Yankee fans, I’m with you: The only reason a player makes that kind of money is because he drives in victory-important runs when you need them, in the late-innings. But clearly I’m not a part of the baseball cartel that has a larger agenda that has virtually nothing to do with winning and losing.

Four years ago when it seemed that Major League Baseball was about to experience another disastrous work stoppage, they avoided it by instituting a “soft” luxury tax of $128 million. That is, if the total player salary of any team exceeded $128 million, that team would have to pay two dollars to the league for every one dollar over the luxury tax. For over four years now the Yankees team salary has exceeded $200 million, so they have a large penalty they have to pay to the league. But because of all the revenue the Yankees get – the largest profit margin of any sports entity in the Western Hemisphere – they have a unique ability to absorb the tax hit.

At the time it was a luxury tax that would only affect one team: The Yankees (they were the only team over). But when asked why it wasn’t set much lower – say, $80 million, which would have forced a number of teams to become more fiscally responsible – an owner anonymously stated that to do so would have forced (Yankees owner) George Steinbrenner to devalue his asset, and that was just out of the question.

With a salary structure over $200 million and a tax hit well over $120 million, Steinbrenner expects the Yankees to be playing for a championship every year, and is understandably perturbed when they get their tails handed to them without making it out of the first round of the playoffs. But the larger issue is this: The Yankees are a Steinbrenner commodity, a personal business asset. So having A-Rod’s $252 million contract on the books adds value to his asset. Furthermore, every player contract depreciates in value over the life of the contract, so Steinbrenner can take an annual $25.2 million tax write-off just for having A-Rod on the roster…

…And you thought this was just about baseball…

It’s hard to imagine that anybody would make the conscious decision to walk away from $25.2 millions per year for the next four years (what’s left of A-Rod’s contract). It’s even harder to imagine that a team would willingly pay somebody who doesn’t win you championships $30 million per year for the next 12 years. But despite him not contributing anything to winning championships, A-Rod has been one of the greatest in-season performers ever. Thirty-million dollars pretty much guarantees you 50+ home runs, 140+ RBIs and sold-out seats in your stadium for every home game as he marches towards Barry Bond’s career home run record (hey, why do you think the Giants put up with Bonds all these years? He didn’t show up at playoff time or with runners on in the late innings of close games, either).

A-Rod and Boras should be careful, though. They would do well to remember that the reason A-Rod initially got his enormous contract was because the Texas Rangers overbid to keep him out of the Yankees hands. If A-Rod opts out of this contract and the Yankees decide they aren’t going to try to keep him (something they’ve indicated would happen) then nobody is going to come close to offering what A-Rod wants. It’s instructive to note that the three years A-Rod was in Arlington the Rangers finished in last all three seasons, so making the decision to offload him to the Yankees was easy. This is a very thin tightrope A-Rod is walking: In order for him to get what he wants he needs to keep the Yankees in play.

– daveydoug