{"id":42254,"date":"2016-03-17T22:54:26","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T02:54:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=42254"},"modified":"2020-07-18T22:54:37","modified_gmt":"2020-07-19T02:54:37","slug":"the-white-sox-organization-must-be-insufferably-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=42254","title":{"rendered":"The White Sox organization must be insufferably bad"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Long story short<\/a>: Chicago White Sox first baseman,\u00a0Adam LaRoche<\/strong>\u00a0abruptly retires from baseball after 12 years in the majors, citing personal reasons. It\u2019s revealed that the White Sox asked LaRoche to cut back how much time his son, Drake, was allowed to be in the team clubhouse and exposure to the team.\u00a0 Instead of complying, LaRoche instead retired, and forfeited the remaining $13 million dollars he was due for the 2016 season.<\/span><\/p>\n

I know that there are going to be a ton of baseball geeks on the internet who will be quick to call Adam LaRoche \u201cstupid,\u201d and other pejoratives meant to put him down, for his decision to walk away from a guaranteed $13 million dollars to play a kid\u2019s game.\u00a0 And absolutely, $13 million dollars is a tremendous amount of money, even for a professional athlete.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, all these people who are\/will be quick to fling stones, also are incapable of occasionally seeing the big picture in life, and the importance of things that matter that aren\u2019t money.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that Adam LaRoche clearly values his son, more than baseball.\u00a0 I\u2019m not a parent, but even I think that that\u2019s kind of a no-brainer, and I have nothing but support and admiration for Roachy for making the decision he made.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the record, LaRoche has earned somewhere around $70 million dollars throughout his career.\u00a0 Sure, taxes may as well slash that number in half, but still $35 million is more money than most everyone will ever see in their entire lives, so it\u2019s safe to assume that a pretty modest blue-collar, hunting-loving redneck like Adam LaRoche just might be fine on the financial front.\u00a0 His brother as well as his father were also professional baseball players, so the entire LaRoche clan is probably okay.<\/span><\/p>\n

Leaving $13 million on the table is certainly a lot of money, but for a guy who\u2019s earned over five times that already, his son\u2019s teenage years clearly are far more valuable to him.<\/span><\/p>\n

It goes without saying that I love that Roachy did this, because ultimately, it\u2019s got to be an embarrassment to the White Sox organization for a player to prefer leaving millions of dollars on the table to go home to his family, rather than suit up and play for their team.\u00a0 Sure, the barring of Drake might have been the straw that broke the camel\u2019s back, but there has to be a lot of unmentioned prior incidents that have escalated to lead to Roachy\u2019s quick decision to bail at this latest infraction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Personally, I\u2019m not a fan of the White Sox anyway, so nothing about hearing that the organization pissed off a player so badly he decided to retire is really that much of a surprise.\u00a0 I base my disdain for the franchise based on my\u00a0visit to U.S. Cellular Field back in 2010<\/a>, when all I really wanted to do was enjoy an evening at a ballpark I\u2019d never been to before, only to arrive at a dungeon with the most Draconian attendance policies I\u2019d ever seen in my life.\u00a0 Sure, it was the ballpark and its restrictive policies that pissed me off, but I\u2019ve associated that dislike for the White Sox franchise itself.\u00a0 Frankly, the White Sox barely exist in my book, and they should be fortunate that they haven\u2019t reached San Francisco Giants-level of dislike, and a desire to see them lose, to no matter whom.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, like I said, there\u2019s more to this story than Roachy using solely the barring of his son, as reason to spontaneously retire.\u00a0 After 12 years in the big leagues, maybe Roachy was just done, and just needed a reason to call it quits.\u00a0 Or maybe the White Sox organization really is that shitty, and this has been a conflict waiting to boil over throughout the last year and change, since he signed with the team.<\/span><\/p>\n

The thing is, Roachy is walking away from the game at a point in his career where he probably still had something left in the tank.\u00a0 Sure, 2015 was a down year for him, but it wasn\u2019t the worst year in his career, and he\u2019s never had two consecutive seasons where he\u2019s been measured in the negatives when it comes to WAR (wins over replacement), the veritable tell-all stat that frequently used to comprehensively measure a player\u2019s value.\u00a0 Ultimately, in that measurement, Roachy can say that he\u2019s basically had an entire career where he earned every dollar he made, and gave it back in terms of baseball production.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such, are not the kinds of players who retire on a whim, and typically try to eke out a season or two or more where they\u2019ll get paid way more than they will actually contribute.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad to see a guy like Adam LaRoche not end up with such a dubious distinction.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m happy for Adam LaRoche for choosing to leave money on the table in lieu of leaving what\u2019s likely a toxic environment, and alternatively opting to\u00a0head home and be a family man<\/a>.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a part of me that he\u2019ll renege on retirement, and come back to the Braves at some point this year, since he made most of his career in Atlanta, and be a good fallback to Freddie Freeman, so he doesn\u2019t feel like he has to play all 162 full games, to carry an otherwise dead weight team all season.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Long story short: Chicago White Sox first baseman,\u00a0Adam LaRoche\u00a0abruptly retires from baseball after 12 years in the majors, citing personal reasons. It\u2019s revealed that the White Sox asked LaRoche to cut back how much time his son, Drake, was allowed to be in the team clubhouse and exposure to the team.\u00a0 Instead of complying, LaRoche … Continue reading The White Sox organization must be insufferably bad<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[62,79,45,15,52],"class_list":["post-42254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-baseball","tag-cashmoney","tag-fail","tag-og","tag-owned"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42256,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42254\/revisions\/42256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}