Aging Out

I can’t help shaking the feeling that sports is a young person’s game.  Pick a sport, and youth will be served, on the field or in the stands.

Jose Abreu of the White Sox accepted the team’s qualifying offer of $17.8 million for next year, the hope being that in the meantime both sides can agree on a multiyear deal.  Clare announced the news from the back seat of the car last night.  I’d picked her and Michele up at the train on our way to visit my in-laws.  They have a very good, loving granddaughter.

She’s also an intense Sox fan and wanted to know what it all meant, so I gave her my take, minus the detachment.  The baseball heroes of my youth didn’t earn $17.8 million a year.  Heck, team salaries didn’t total $17.8 million a year.  Instead, we’re talking people who fought to make $20,000-$30,000.  Only the Kalines and Aarons could hope to do better.

But times change, although I seem to be more or less stuck in the past.  I wince at any ballplayer being called “blue-collar.”  Only if he’s making minimum wage, the federal not the MLB kind.  Maybe this is all the magic of sports; as kids we don’t think in terms of finances.  We pick our heroes and want them to stay around their entire careers.  I don’t want to go back to the bad old days of the reserve clause.  But $17.8 million sure makes for a gulf between where Abreu plays and I sit.  I need to get rich.

That would solve everything.