Sports Time Radio

I think everybody has that one thing that really bothers them about sports no matter what sport they like. Now I have one of these issues and as always, I’d like to know what yours is and what you think about mine.

I have a big issue when a player is coming to an end of a long-term deal and he or she starts to complain that they’re under paid or that they’re out playing their contract. I always wonder if when they signed this contract if they didn’t realize that the market would change, and salaries would go up. You’d think that their agent would inform them of this, but I guess they either don’t listen or don’t care.

Now when players signed these type of big money long-term deals you almost always hear them talk about financial security. Obviously when a player is signed for 10 years and millions of dollars, they’ll have financial security, but here’s what I’m wondering. Say a player signs for just a couple of years and ends up making let’s say between $50 and $60 million dollars. Wouldn’t that also make them financially secure?

Now with the contracts that players are offered in professional sports today I understand that they jump on that type of a contract. Remember Juan Soto just turned down what was reported as close to $450 million dollars in a long-term deal. Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees also decided to play out the final year of his arbitration and “bet on himself”.

It looks like that is really going to pay off for Judge as he’s having the best year of his career and will probably be named American League Most Valuable Player before hitting the free agent market. Now it would be surprising if the Yankees allowed Judge to sign with another team, but there are a lot of teams with a lot of money and I’m sure they’d love to steal a player like Judge from the Yankees.

With the type of money, the top baseball players are being paid there seems to be less complaining when they get to an end of a contract. It seems to me that the majority of the complaining about contracts come from NBA and NFL players.

Now to be fair I’ll give any NFL player on a rookie contract a break if they complain. There’s really no negotiating those rookie contracts and your more or less stuck with what the collective bargaining agreement says you’ll get. Then if you’re a 1st round draft pick the team that selected you has a 5th year option on that rookie contract for way under market value. I can understand why certain 4th year player complain when they see what some of the other players at their position get contract wise while they’re stuck on a rookie deal.

It does seem with the amount of money that players make in today’s game there does seem to be less and less complaining, but there’s always that one player that thinks they’re under paid and let’s everybody know about it.

Now in most cases teams will give in to a player demands and re-negotiate their contract, but every now and then there’s a team that stands pat and allows that player to walk away or they trade that player. That was what we just saw with Soto. The Washington Nationals must’ve realized after he turned down that large contract offer that they wouldn’t be able to re-sign him, so they tried to get the best trade package possible for him.

This seems to be the case more often than not since most teams would like to get something for a player, they can’t re-sign instead of watching that player walk away and get nothing in return.

There are always contract disputes in sports, but I just have a problem when a player has a contract and starts complaining about it. This is one of those situations where I wonder if it’s just me who doesn’t like when a player does this.

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