WHAT'S A JETER WORTH?

What would YOU pay Jeter if you were the Yankees?

According to ESPN, sources inside the New York Yankees are stating they are “at odds” with shortstop Derek Jeter regarding a new contract.

The Yankees, reportedly, are OK with giving the 36 year old, who posted career worst numbers in 2010, a contract in the area of 3 years at $21 million per. Jeter is looking for at least a 4 year contract, and prefers a 5 or 6 year deal.

There’s at least one unsympathetic voice in the Yankee front office. "Tell him the deal is three years at $15 million a year, take it or leave it," the person taking the hard-line approach said. "Wait him out and he'll wind up taking it. Where's he gonna go, Cincinnati?"

Are we really looking at a potential face-off between the richest and most popular organization in American professional sports and their most marketable and popular player? If so, who wins? Or, better yet, who should relent? Who needs who the most? Sounds like questions for a guy who loves answering these types of questions.

No, jackass. I mean me.

DOWNSIZING THE NFL

Once upon a time there was a professional football league where guys wore pads made of glorified Styrofoam, helmets made of leather and sans face protection, and there were no mouthguards to be seen. Horse collar and clothesline tackles were legal, and the quarterback was equally vulnerable to a hit as the rest of the team. There were no fines for gouging eyes or groin-punching; only a fifteen yard penalty, if that.

Dick Butkus, baddest football player of his generation,
has thighs the size of Patrick Willis' forearms.

As time went on, technology advanced and the league adopted hard plastic pads and helmets. Facemasks were introduced, as were rib and neck protection. The dangerous tackling practices were outlawed and players began being penalized if a drop of sweat fell on the quarterback. Fines were levied for harder-than-the-average-person-finds-comfortable-to-watch hits, and suspensions were levied if a player performed the outrageous act of trying to stop a receiver from catching a ball.

And, despite all the protection technology and rules have provided, serious injuries in this professional football league are much more prevalent than ever before. And, the current head honcho of the league is shaking in his boots in fear that a player may actually die on the field before too long.

What happened? Weren’t these technologies supposed to help protect the players that used them? Weren’t these stringent rules put into place to limit devastating injuries supposed to actually reduce devastating injuries? What happened?

CHEATING OUR YOUTH

Once I was playing Yahtzee with my daughter. She was three. (It was a child’s version. She’s not some kind of Yahtzee savant.) After she rolled her three turns and didn’t get her desired result, she wanted another one. Thinking it was cute, I went ahead and let her go again. When she still didn’t get her desired result, she asked again and I, again, obliged. This went on a few more times until she rolled the “yahtzee” she’d been looking for. When the game was over and the points were counted, she had beaten me handily; in large part to the thirty-five or forty extra rolls she was allowed. She jumped up and down taunting “I WON! DADDY LOST! I WON! DADDY LOST!” (Yes, she was taunting.) That didn’t seem so cute. Sure, she had won, but only because I had allowed her to. It’s not the sour grapes driving that last sentence. Winning or losing against a three-year old is hardly worth getting excited about. I just wanted her and I to have a good time, which we did, even with the taunting.

A few days later, we played again. This time, when she asked for extra rolls, I said “No,” and that “It was against the rules.” This ignited a fury in her I had only seen while turning off “Yo Gabba Gabba” and telling her it’s bedtime. She dropped to the floor and bawled her eyes out, kicking the ground and screaming as loud as her little vocal chords would allow. When my wife entered the room and asked her what had happened, she sobbed “Daddy isn’t being fair.” I explained my stance and my wife stared me down like I was an over competitive psychotic who needed to win so badly that he’d crush his daughter’s fragile ego to do so. I explained that she needs to know how to play within the rules; that cheating is no way to win a game. It wasn’t competitive. It was a life lesson.

Understand, I knew my three-year old daughter was not intentionally cheating. She didn’t even realize the concept yet. But, she understood the philosophy of winning at all costs. The idea of a game is to win, and, to her and most children her age, this needs to be accomplished by any means necessary. What I had effectively done by allowing her extra rolls the first time we played, then allowing her to exuberantly celebrate her victory, was to reinforce that belief. Now, it was my responsibility to teach her that winning isn’t always the point of playing a game, especially if you play outside the rules to do so.