It's the American Dream, isn't it, for athletes and artists and entertainers, to reach the top of their profession and become absurdly rich and famous?
I think the fans are more like the donors. The problem with fans, as such, is that they crave entertainment, they want the very best, and they will pay for it. So they are the ones who feed the machine.
With regard to the win-now philosophy, I think the Sox basically announced they were in win-now mode this year when they signed Pearce. That move made no sense otherwise. And to me it still doesn't make sense they would sign Pearce at the expense of not getting any relievers.
And what you're doing here is engaging in a lot of 'tarring everyone with the same brush'. I don't think the posters on this forum are quite as guilty of groupthink as you're making it sound.
Kimbrel thought he could score a higher deal than Chapman's 86 million because his career numbers are better and his agent told him so.
Craig did not have a great contract year and he had a frightening postseason, and his value was hurt as a result. Probably much more than he ever imagined.
It's as simple as this: if we lose the division this year or lose in the playoffs because of a weak bullpen, it makes us look a little stupid for having such a ginormous payroll with so little of it devoted to such an important area.
I think so. I'm guessing the strategy all along was to get one 'name guy' and do the rest with dumpster diving. You might almost call that a restrained approach, huh?
Not necessarily. If John Henry approves signing Kimbrel for 4 years and 60 million and incurs all the extra tax etc., we're better off baseball-wise, he's worse off economically.
The mega-deals actually have not increased quite as much as might have been expected, considering that it's been 18 years since A-Rod signed the groundbreaking 10 year/252 million deal with Texas.
The highest now is Stanton's 325 million, but that's a 13-year deal.
When some people were predicting Harper would get 400 million a while back, I was skeptical about it.
I'm not sure that applies to Varitek. It's my recollection that Boras was his agent and was looking for a laughably big deal because of Jason's reputation as the great game-caller, but no one was interested and he ended up returning to the Sox on a humblingly small deal.