What They’Re Saying

Views from sportswriters around the country concerning the Alex Rodriguez contract with the Texas Rangers:

—- The only difference between (Texas owner Tom) Hicks and Vito Corleone of “The Godfather” fame is that the Rangers’ owner didn’t have to put a gun to Rodriguez’s head to convince him to accept $252 million to play shortstop in Texas for the next 10 years.

Imagine that.

In the most stunning free-agent signing in Rangers’ history - yes, even surpassing the Nolan Ryan deal in December 1988 - Hicks overwhelmed Rodriguez’s reservations about playing in Texas by offering him the richest sports contract ever.

Let it be said, here and now, that this was entirely about the money. Or close to it.

Agent Scott Boras made it clear early on that it would take $200 million to land A-Rod. Oh, no, the Rangers said, playing hard to get. We won’t give you a penny less than a cool quarter of a billion dollars.

Let me repeat that: “A quarter of a billion dollars.”

Jim Reeves, Fort Worth Star-Telegram —-

Alex Rodriguez cashed in Monday like no athlete ever has, agreeing to the most unfathomably staggering contract in the history of sports, more than a quarter of a billion dollars. He is a good kid and a model citizen, but he becomes the smiling face of greed and gluttony now, fairly or unfairly, because that’s one of the clauses that comes with this kind of contract.

Rodriguez has always conducted himself with uncommon grace and dignity, but now he has sold a slice of his soul for that $252 million, becoming a little more like all the rest of the athletes keeping score with dollars. It isn’t just that he went after the money. If Oprah and Jim Carrey and Ricky Martin get paid like that, Rodriguez is entitled, too. It’s that he took it from a team that is equal parts loser and sucker, and he’s far more likely to be swallowed by the quagmire in Texas than he is to lift the Rangers out of it.

Dan LeBatard, Miami Herald —-

Congratulations, A-Rod. Two-hundred-fifty-something million, huh? Not bad, not bad at all. What are you going to buy first? The Minnesota Twins?

Michael Rosenberg, Detroit Free Press —-

Alex Rodriguez became America’s wealthiest athlete Monday. He also became the latest living symbol of grave trouble for America’s pastime.

Thomas Hill, New York Daily News —-

As Scott Boras, the real commissioner of baseball, can heartily attest: It only takes one. It always has.

Before Tom Hicks and Monday’s mind-blowing $252 million contract to Alex Rodriguez, and before the $123.8 million Rocky Mountain high bestowed on Mike Hampton, there was Kevin Malone and the $105 million for Kevin Brown. And before that, it was Jerry Reinsdorf and the $55 million deal for the baseball pariah known as Albert Belle.

And if you care to trace baseball’s hypocritical money tree back even further, there was Jerry Colangelo making Jay Bell a $34 million shortstop.

All of this is baseball’s dirty little secret that neither acting commissioner Bud Selig nor his bogus owner cronies care to admit. The two common denominators in these groundbreaking signings are that all of them were cases of one owner bidding against himself, and none of them involved the Yankees.

Bill Madden, New York Daily News —-

Texas owner Tom Hicks still can’t be Gotham City’s Steinbrenner. But he did on Monday make things wonderfully uncomfortable for the Bombers’ boss, who employs the other great young shortstop in the game, Derek Jeter. If Jeter’s good friend Rodriguez just signed for a quarter of a billion dollars, how much will Steinbrenner have to cough up to keep Jeter in pinstripes?

Such a concern couldn’t befall a nice empire. It’s about time for a little comeuppance for the Yankees, where money, which wins in baseball, has never been an object.

Kevin B. Blackistone, Dallas Morning News