Bryan Joiner

Here are two nuggets from Harvey Araton’s piece on A-Rod, the latest excoriation by a Times writer on “player as businessman” in the age of players as business men (it’s astonishing that they can’t wrap their heads around this):

Take this for what it is worth from the player who talked the talk but wouldn’t take the Yankees’ postseason calls for the privilege of handsomely compensating and (we could argue) eventually overpaying him after another playoff failure.

So the Yankees overpaid A-Rod. That would be good for A-Rod, right?

Rodriguez has long been a money magnet and serial attention grabber, but now we are supposed to believe that Boras alone bungled Rodriguez’s second free agency fling?

Wait… now team Boras/A-Rod bungled the negotiations?

Which is it? Did A-Rod bungle the negotiations, or is he overpaid? If he is overpaid, then it would seem he did not bungle the negotiations. That they did not go as smoothly as the Yankees would have liked is too bad for them and their reactionary fans in the press and beyond, who used the two-week window of A-Rod’s potential free agency as a time to bash the crap out of a guy who merely won two MVPs for the franchise. Even I joked that he came crawling back, but it was a joke — the guy is making $275 million as a base, the richest contract in sports history. A-Rod got his contract and the Yankees got their third baseman. What is everybody so upset about?