DALLAS -- Nobody pays a shortstop $252 million. Nobody pays a baseball player $252 million. Nobody with all his faculties in order would pay any mere employee $252 million when he didn't even pay that much for his entire business.
|  | | A-Rod could produce even bigger numbers as he moves from Safeco Field to the Ballpark in Arlington. |
But Tom Hicks did.
Tom Hicks paid Alex Rodriguez $252 million because he had a vision. It may have been a vision that caused his peers to come down with a major case of indigestion. But that was because it was a vision they didn't get.
His peers were still looking at this madness Monday as baseball madness. And if you just viewed what Tom Hicks paid to his new shortstop as a baseball decision, "madness" was one of the kinder words you could use to describe it.
But to Tom Hicks, the great A-Rod was far more than just a guy to catch ground balls, a guy to hit in the middle of his batting order, a guy to help his team get out of last place.
To Tom Hicks, A-Rod was the human tow truck who was going to pull his franchise out of that big ol' hole in the middle of Texas and plunk it down in a whole new universe.
The universe of the Yankees and Braves.
The universe of the Cardinals and Dodgers.
The universe of the Indians and Mets.
With one wild signing of one high-profile baseball player for one insane amount of U.S. dollars, the Texas Rangers had suddenly arrived.
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This was a very big number ... but I'm a businessman. ”
--Texas owner Tom Hicks |
"They just paid their tuition to become one of the giant-revenue teams," said agent Tom Reich. "And A-Rod is the catalyst."
Before Monday, before this signing, nobody looked at the Rangers -- even in their best years -- as anything more than just one of those pesky little teams destined to spend their season fighting for the right to get swept by the Yankees in October.
But now they are suddenly one of the titans of the industry. It came at an outrageous price. But Alex Rodriguez's presence changes everything about the Texas Rangers. And Tom Hicks saw that from the start.
"I always felt this was a little bit of a long shot for us," Rangers GM Doug Melvin said Monday night. "We've been disappointed in many deals before this. But Tom was the driving force in this. . . . He kept saying, 'We're gonna get A-Rod.' "
Hicks has made a fortune in life, buying downtrodden businesses, building them up and then selling them for a massive profit. So when he bought the Rangers for $250 million less than four years ago, he had a mental blueprint of everything that needed to change for that same formula to work in the case of this baseball team.
He just didn't realize he would have to pay one player more than his franchise cost to make that happen.
"Never," he said Monday. "I never could have thought that."
He stopped. He laughed.
"But I've learned more about the sports business than I knew then," he said.
So he and Melvin laid the groundwork for this day two years ago. Their 95-win baseball team had just gotten pummeled in the Division Series by the Yankees. Again.
Their payroll was too high. Their cash register had more money going out than money coming in.
From afar, they might have appeared to be enjoying the most successful run in team history. But from Tom Hicks' vantage point, they looked to be a team on the road to disaster.
"The Texas Rangers will be a professional team next year," Hicks said. "And we plan to be a professional team every year. We were an unproffesional team two years ago."
So they blew their old formula up and got ready to retool. The trade of Juan Gonzalez was at the epicenter of a drive to make their team younger and cheaper -- for one year.
But at the end of that year, they knew what was waiting for them: The greatest free-agent class of recent times. That's what.
And the Texas Rangers were going to be ready for it.
"We had our eyes on this year," Melvin said. "We knew this would be a good year for free agents. Griffey was going to be a free agent. Jim Edmonds was going to be a free agent. Chipper Jones was going to be a free agent."
And, oh yeah, Alex Rodriguez was going to be a free agent.
When this process started, the Rangers weren't on A-Rod's short list. And they were barely on his long list. But Tom Hicks wasn't giving up without a fight. So they lured A-Rod to Texas, at least to listen, at least to look around.
And then Hicks took over. He took personal charge of Rodriguez's grand tour of the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metroplex. He got personally involved in the negotiations.
And when that happened, Rangers first baseman Rafael Palmeiro said Monday, "I always thought we'd have the best chance. I know the way Mr. Hicks does things. I knew he wanted this guy. And I didn't think he was going to let anybody outbid him."
"Oh, I can't say that," Hicks said. "He could easily have said no. But I could tell when I spent two days with him that I got his attention.
"I could tell he really liked having a person in ownership he could talk to. This man played the last seven years for a team with an owner that was 72 years old and lived in Japan, whom he'd never met.
"And if he'd gone to play for one of these other teams, if it was one owned by NewsCorp. (the Dodgers) or one owned by AOL-Time-Warner (the Braves), he would have had a different type of ownership. So I knew, at the end of the day, that he realized that if he came here, he was coming to a team where he could have a long-term relationship to the owner. And I think that, together with all the baseball reasons, was what made this happen."
Yeah, that and $252 million.
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.
Hicks, as owner of the NHL's Dallas Stars, once had a similar effect on Brett Hull, another star in another sport who thought he never wanted to play in Texas. But that was different, he said.
"Brett Hull was a guy who came here to put the Stars over the top," Hicks said. "This guy is different. This is the foundation on which we can build to get the rest of the pieces in place to put ourselves over the top.
"This," he said, "would be more like signing Wayne Gretzky 10 years before he retired."
So what was 252 million bucks when A-Rod Gretzky was knocking on his door? If Tom Hicks had any regrets over handing out the richest contract in American team-sports history, he was sure faking it well.
"I was able to sleep last night when I went home," he said, "with no difficulty."
And if his co-owners everywhere were the ones doing the tossing and turning, that was their problem. Tom Hicks had his vision -- no matter how many of his critics may forever confuse it with tunnel vision.
Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com.
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