A-Rod was robbed for Rookie of the Year 1996!

[Donn Beach]

Baseball going from selling hotdogs to selling lobster-fajita-lined luxury boxes.

Tom Hicks knows he has a lot of explaining to do about that $252 million. One of baseball's highest-ranking officials, Sandy Alderson, called this contract "stupefying" and "disturbing" on Monday.
"He's an extraordinary player," Alderson said. "But I don't know that anybody is so extraordinary that he can differentiate himself from all the other players in the game like this. . . . In two days, we've doubled what previously had been baseball's most lucrative contract. I don't like the exponentiality of that."
But Tom Hicks' response is that if this contract creates problems, they are "problems that have to be solved by the whole industry." What he saw when he plowed into the thick of this deal was not the Minnesota Twins shaking their heads -- but the ghost of what used to be his own joke of a franchise dissolving into a distant memory.
"The Texas Rangers never had the cache here in this marketplace that we now have," Hicks said, becoming the first baseball figure in history to use the word "cache" in a nationally televised press conference. "When they came here in 1971, they played in a ballpark that was barely adequate. They were the stepchild of all the major sports franchises."
But then, in 1994, they opened the gleaming Ballpark at Arlington, with lobster-fajita-lined luxury boxes as far as the eye could see. That unlocked the cash box. Now A-Rod unlocks the skyliner to the rest of the universe.