Baseballhead:
Thank God it's Over

Michael Cox

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OK. Down to business.

Finally, the biggest hype of baseball's offseason is over.

Alex Rodriguez is a Texas Ranger.

After a final day of negotiations that saw ESPN not only reporting the rumored deal, but apparently ordering every columnist to write about the unannounced signing as if it was past history (remember Bobby Valentine at Wharton College last spring? ESPN hopes you don't), Tom Hicks stood at a podium and welcomed the absent Rodriguez.

What's wrong with this picture?

Plenty.

What the hell kind of agent celebrates a signing without the player in question? Scott Boras, that's who. Forbidding teams to negotiate within A-Rod's earshot, it is crystal clear that the greatest young shortstop in the game totally left the final decision up to Boras. It was an opportunity for Boras to pay tribute to his own negotiating skills -- that there was a player involved was secondary. Boras made every effort to make sure no one could appeal to Rodriguez' emotions and potentially sign him for less than full market value.

Forget the billboards, the conference rooms and the learjets. Forget outfield fences and farm systems and ownership -- it was all about the Benjamins. Going into the offseason a team leader and coming out of it a solo player is a difficult thing to achieve, but with Boras' ample assistance, somehow Rodriguez managed to do it. Of course, he can retake his good-guy crown as fast as he can spike Chad Curtis through a ping-pong table for shutting off "Who Let the Dogs Out," but that remains to be seen.

Hicks, who proved that money was no object with his Dallas Stars, finally admitted Monday that the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is a major baseball market. That and a pitching staff will win him a World Series. Unfortunately, the pitching staff is still missing, and with the team's new payroll you may be seeing what you'll be getting.

Still, the Rangers suddenly have as good a chance as anyone at winning consistent AL West titles during the next decade -- especially if the Athletics keep shopping their best players, and the Mariners perform offense-sucking moves like the rumored Mike Bordick deal. Too late to make some moves that could have partially replaced Rodriguez' offense, the M's instead clung to the whimsical hope that emotion had anything to do with the negotiating process. Unfortunately it may even be too late to get into the Manny Ramirez race -- a race that will net a better value for the (still-astronomical) money.

Historically, Seattle has always developed top-quality stars only to see them play elsewhere as soon as they began asking for market value. Mariner fans, welcome back to 1986. No Griffey, no Johnson, no A-Rod -- Edgar Martinez remains, but only because he accepted about half of his free market value to stay. We'll now watch to see if the M's got the Pat Gillick who engineered the Blue Jays' dominant years, or the one who presided over the Orioles' self-immolation.

The only bright side for Seattle is that since the Rangers blew last year, their compensatory draft picks will be reasonably high.

Speaking of the Orioles, it remains to be seen as to whether Hicks' new free-spending ways will buy him a championship or two, or make him the Peter Angelos of the West. The Dodgers had no problem spending a little cash over the past few years either, but they ended up with the only team ever that Davey Johnson couldn't turn into a winner.

Of course, as expected the signing is adding more fuel to the fire that will soon see Bud Selig killing the game in another failed attempt at coercing a salary cap. ''I know there are some people who will say, 'Stop whining,' but clearly we are in a crisis situation,'' Selig lackey Sandy Alderson said immediately after the announcement. He probably prepared that statement in September, knowing he'd have time to get the wording just right before Rodriguez put pen to contract.

At the risk of my face turning blue, I'll say it again: it makes no sense to try and force a salary cap until the owners more equitably share their TV revenues, and that is likely to happen when Arlington's "Wild Waves" becomes an active volcano. Hicks, like Turner or Steinbrenner, is counting on every penny of his team's cable deal with his own network to bring home a World Series.

To coin the now-hackneyed ESPN catchphrase, you can't stop the big-market owners, you can only hope to contain them, and Tom Hicks just discovered the "on" button.

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