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Cemetery visit bolsters Hawk before Hall call
By Ross McKeonTim Brown
January 7, 2010
On a day that every year devolves into tantrums and hostilities, Andre Dawson didn’t wait for the vote – a simple yay or nay on a 21-year baseball career – to honor the people who put him there.
On a day the roar over the jilted and the process that bore the injustices would drown out the words of the gracious and appreciative, Dawson dragged himself on two rebuilt knees into a south Florida cemetery.
Yay or nay, whether what came was good news or bad, Dawson said his thanks. He might not run like he once did, might not be as strong as he once was, but he could still carry his share of gratitude.
To the grandmother, who taught him patience.
To the mother, who taught him so much more.
Together, they’d turned ”Pudgy,” his childhood nickname, into ”Hawk.” Together, they’d supplied the broom sticks that clubbed the pitched rocks off the neighbors’ houses on Southwest 7th Place in Florida.
They’d pushed him through Southwest Miami High and Florida A&M, watched him grow into a ballplayer and then into a man, encouraged him when it seemed his legs would not take him another step.
Now those relatives are gone, but Dawson wouldn’t let them miss this, this day, because – yay or nay – it would be as much about them as it would be about him.
So he got up early Wednesday morning and went to the gym and on the way back home, hours before the phone call would come or not, stopped to maybe lean on them one more time. He’d lived this day eight times before, had started them all out the same, but had not taken this particular route home before.
”I felt a little more optimistic,” he said. ”I wanted to share a few things at the grave sites. … And it kind of alleviated a lot of the nervousness.”
Meaningfully, it was his grandmother – Eunice Taylor – who’d told him so long ago that this was all a blessing, that the game should be fun and never to forget that, to enjoy the journey and try not to think so hard about the outcome.
She had forbidden him from running off after high school to play baseball at the Kansas City Royals’ academy. She had sent him instead to college. And then she would write three times a week telling him not just to stay there, but to ”take God with you.”
And it was she who had told him, ”If you have the talent, the ability, one day someone will take notice,” and there he was Wednesday morning, nine years on the ballot, still waiting on one more ”one day.”
”I had to do what I had to do this morning,” he said. ”I thanked her – for the way she instilled things in me.”
Beneath the blare over blank ballots and wailing over near misses for Bert Blyleven and – OK, shockingly – Roberto Alomar, Andre Dawson pulled 15 more votes than were minimally required, became the 292nd elected member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and in July will be enshrined with Whitey Herzog and Doug Harvey.
With him, he takes almost 2,800 career hits and 438 home runs and an MVP award, earned lifting the Cubs into last place in 1987. He takes the face of late-’80’s collusion, having hurled a signed and otherwise blank contract at the owners’ deceit.
He takes five tools rubbed raw and ragged by the floor of Olympic Stadium, and rebirth in Chicago, and knees he somehow managed to stand on past his 40th birthday.
”It was painful,” he said Wednesday afternoon. ”It was painful for a lot of years. [But], I knew if I fell flat on my face, somebody would carry me off the field.”
By the end, he said, he was simply thankful to have lasted as long as he did. Thirteen years later, it seems he’ll need another knee-replacement surgery, which will be his third overall. He sort of laughed when asked about it, like the process of wearing out knees – both his own and prosthetic – had long ago advanced past anything reasonable.
But, somehow, they got him this far.
So, he cried some, and warmed in the delight of his wife and daughter. He stared at the final vote, at how close he was to sharing the stage with Blyleven – ”It’s awful to even think about five votes,” he said. ”My heart goes out to him. I feel for him. Five votes, it’s a little hard to swallow.” – and at all those great ballplayers feeling like he did for eight years.
His mom, Mattie Brown, was alive for the first five or so.
”It’s going to happen one day,” she’d say. ”It’s inevitable. Just be ready when it happens.”
It happened. If it hadn’t, well, Andre Dawson still wanted to say thanks.
Yay or nay.
”It has been,” he said, ”a wonderful day for me.”
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Cardinals’ short-lived Holliday celebration
By Ross McKeen
January 7, 2010
Nobody wants to ask the question. Today is a day of celebration for the St. Louis Cardinals, and everything else can wait. Matt Holliday agreed to return to St. Louis, where for the next seven years he’ll play left field and earn $120 million. The Cardinals got their bopper. Holliday got paid. All is well with the world.
But the big question. Oh, it lingers in the darkest part of every Cardinals fan’s head and in the nightmares of Cardinals management. Nobody wants to ask the question today, tomorrow or otherwise because they’re afraid of the answer.
If Matt Holliday costs $120 million, what on earth does that make Albert Pujols worth?
Yes, the greatest hitter today, on his way to being one of the greatest of any day, is due to hit free agency after the 2011 season. Pujols isn’t even 30, and he is already a lock for the Hall of Fame. He has won the last two National League MVP awards, three altogether. He is this generation’s answer to Ted Williams: hits for power, hits for average, takes walks, doesn’t strike out and punishes the ball with such frightening frequency that pitchers would take a felony charge over pitching to him. One pitcher, in a moment of brutal – literally – honesty, said: “I’d rather punch a priest than pitch to him.”
Thankfully, no clergy have been harmed as Pujols treks toward baseball immortality. Already he has achieved such in St. Louis, his legend so large that he and Stan Musial share the mantel as greatest Cardinal ever. In nine years, Pujols has imprinted himself on a franchise in the way so few do. New York has Derek Jeter. Seattle has Ichiro Suzuki. St. Louis has Albert Pujols.
Jeter and Ichiro signed deals that paid them as much for who they are and what they mean as how they play. That St. Louis must compound what Pujols deserves as a hitter with his iconic stature is the sort of whammy unseen since “Press Your Luck” aired.
Because while Holliday is a great player – with agent Scott Boras’ great work somehow leveraging the Cardinals into $17 million a year long-term when the market for Holliday was more zygote than full-term – he does not, cannot and will not mean what Pujols does to the Cardinals. That is no insult to Holliday. Just a testament to Pujols.
So now the fun part. Just how much is Albert Pujols worth to the St. Louis Cardinals? It’s sort of like asking how much the Mona Lisa is worth to the Louvre: It’s impossible to put a proper dollar figure on it; you just know it would look odd anywhere else.
Among other athletes, top-end baseball players are the most well-compensated, and it’s not really close. In the NFL, a contract isn’t a contract so much as concurrent one-year terms of indentured servitude. In the NHL and NBA, restrictive salary caps limit earning potential. LeBron James is entering free agency this offseason in his prime, and at most he can make around $125 million over six years – and that’s only if he re-signs with Cleveland. Joe Mauer will get at least $25 million more if he takes a discount from Minnesota, and for Mauer’s overall greatness, he still isn’t in Pujols’ ZIP code.
The only such player is Alex Rodriguez, whose 10-year, $275 million deal going into his age 33 season was a function of New York Yankees largesse. A-Rod’s previous contract, a $252 million deal he opted out of, was a yet-unmatched outlier itself. Jeter’s $189 million was the closest to it.
Surely Pujols can argue he is worth more. In 2001, the year of Pujols’ debut, the Cardinals had $123.3 million in revenue and lost $5.1 million, according to Forbes’ calculations. Today, they rake in $195 million in revenue – 10th in baseball, up from 14th nine years ago, and nearly a 60 percent increase – and have operated at a profit for the last four seasons.
When Pujols was a rookie, Forbes said the Cardinals were worth $243 million. In less than a decade, they’ve doubled their value: $486 million.
Much of this, of course, is due to baseball’s savvy financial maneuvers during the 2000s. And the Cardinals deserve credit for extending Pujols through 2011 when he was arbitration eligible for the first time. Never before and never since had a player entering his fourth season received a contract as big as Pujols’ seven-year, $100 million deal with a team option in 2011 worth another $11 million.
The Cardinals’ risk paid off with a World Series victory in 2006, which would’ve been Pujols’ final year before free agency. Had Pujols entered the market as a 26-year-old coming off a World Series run and with numbers comparable to Williams and DiMaggio and Foxx and Greenberg, he would have shattered Rodriguez’s record.
He can still approach it. Does Pujols ask for $30 million, to match Rodriguez’s average salary with home-run incentives? Or does he try for 10 years, knowing he could break whatever records Rodriguez sets? Maybe he’d prefer a shorter deal with less money committed but a higher annual value – say, five years, $160 million?
Such is the catalyst for the night terrors in which Cardinals management sees a Pujols standing next to Hal Steinbrenner or John Henry or Arte Moreno, flashing his teeth and holding up a new jersey. The Cardinals chased Holliday to make themselves heavy favorites in the NL Central and plug a gaping hole in their lineup. They also did so to satiate Pujols, to show him that the grass on the other side looks like it’s been sprayed with Roundup.
Here’s the truth: The Cardinals checked with Pujols, whose preference was to re-sign Holliday but who wasn’t exactly keen on burning down the franchise for it. If the Cardinals signed Holliday with the intention of keeping their payroll at $100 million with a new contract for Pujols, they’d better hire Enron’s accountants.
This is a huge commitment, and the Cardinals are banking on enough financial stability to pay both. There’s no sense in giving Robin $120 million unless they’re sure they can pay Batman what he wants. And yet we know that markets shift, that revenues can dry up, that stuff happens, and that nothing – not even for the most important Cardinal since Stan the Man – is truly guaranteed until ink hits paper.
St. Louis bit hard and swallowed deep and risked the future of its franchise Tuesday night. After months of negotiating with the toughest agent in the business, the Cardinals got Matt Holliday. They can sleep deeply.
Only for one night, though.
Now comes the really hard part.
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