Prince Receives a Kingly Sum

Keeping it all in the family....

The Detroit Tigers have added one big—in every way—bat by signing former Milwaukee Brewers first baseman Prince Fielder to the largest contract in franchise (Tigers) history. The son of Cecil “Big Daddy” (not the Tennessee Williams variety—from the Madeleine Sherwood vehicle, which also features Elizabeth Taylor, whose remarkable Christie’s auction exhibit I [Evander] viewed, and Paul Newman) Fielder, Prince should have few problems rekindling the legendary family magic in Motown. On an annual basis, the nine-year, $214 million (I had heard another report of $217 million), budget-buster would make Prince the fifth-highest annual earner currently in Major League Baseball.

Advertisement

About rightoffthebatbook

Co-author of the book, "Right Off the Bat: Baseball, Cricket, Literature, and Life"
This entry was posted in Baseball and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to Prince Receives a Kingly Sum

  1. Ron Kaplan says:

    $214, $217…what’s $3 million between friends? But seriously, folks, what kinds of salaries to the elite cricket players haul in and is there the same hand-wringing in those nations over such astronomical figures as there is in the U.S.? Fielder, Pujols, et al will get those paychecks even if (when?) their performances slowly (or quickly) drop off (see Jaysons Werth and Bay and Adam Dunn, who may just be) while large numbers of their fellow citizens find it a struggle to meet their mortgage payments.

  2. Pay for players in the IPL can be quite high. One baseball school of thought goes, “It’s not my money.” We’re sure cricket fans, by and large, would agree. There will always be questioning whether Werth (to take this example) is worth it, whether Bay has already gone out with the tide, or if Dunn is as you write. But for the most part, fans of big-time players crave big-time entertainment. The contracts themselves are all part of the spectacle.

  3. Ron Kaplan says:

    Hmm, contracts as spectacle sport?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s