Play no sad songs for Chris Davis, who reportedly slips into retirement with $164,956,740 in baseball money already in the bank and $23 million still owed to him by the Baltimore Orioles.
Nice work if you can get it – but I don’t get it. How could any team … how could any sport … how could any business … lose such financial perspective that any individual winds up with this kind of money?
Much less an individual in a primitive occupation making a living by hitting a round object with a piece of wood.
Much less an individual who set records by failing to hit that round object with that piece of wood.
Take note of the moment, because we’re not only marking Davis’ retirement here, but a way of life for the Baltimore baseball franchise — and maybe for major league baseball.
Davis’s final contract with the Orioles was the famous seven-year, $161 million deal that set off years of performance frustration and financial exasperation. It’ll probably be the last contract of such extravagance that we’ll witness in the foreseeable future of the Baltimore franchise.
The Orioles can’t afford it anymore, nor can most major league baseball teams. This is the modern reality of major league baseball. If you need evidence, look no further than Manny Machado, who might have become the greatest Oriole in history except that Baltimore couldn’t afford him or his $350 million ten-year contract.
Or look no further than the current Orioles, stumbling through one of the most dispiriting years in the two-thirds of a century since they arrived back in town.
They’re going with kids because kids are all they can afford in the current marketplace. And maybe that’ll work out. They tried such a system long ago, when Paul Richards ran the club, and ultimately it led to a 20-year reign as the winningest team in all of baseball.
But the rules were different then. Players didn’t automatically become free agents when they became five-year veterans. And the money was far different back then.
Today, after five years, the most talented players can take a hike and go where the most breath-taking money leads them – to New York and Boston and Los Angeles, to the places where money never runs out.
What that means is that, in mid-size markets like Baltimore, last week’s retirement of Davis signals the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. Forget the big contracts for the (imagined) super stars.
Chris Davis is the last of a breed.
From now on, Baltimore holds onto players during their years of shimmery promise – and then, inevitably, we watch them slip out a revolving door as they begin to fulfill that promise.
And then the revolving door will bring in a new batch of kids who will stick around – but only as long as they’re affordable.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Allow me a few paragraphs of time travel, and let’s go back to Johnny Carson’s monologue the night after Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. I’m paraphrasing here, but I think the joke still works 57 years after Carson first delivered it. “The good Read more
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