Kuzul

Part of being a sportswriter these days is always being on top of your stuff.

I check my e-mail constantly. I’m on Twitter all day. I don’t sleep as much or as well as I used to since I’m always afraid that if I go to bed too early or sleep in too late, I might miss something important.

At this point, I’m even up on Saturdays and Sundays before 7:00 a.m. Tough life, huh?

So with that said, it’s only logical that right before I went to bed on Wednesday night, I did my final Twitter/e-mail check of the evening. Granted, I’d just done the same check 20 minutes before. But again, it’s just part of that whole “staying on top of your stuff” thing.

I wasn’t expecting to see much in that final go-around until I logged on to Twitter and saw one minor, innocuous posting: Ken Rosenthal was reporting that Carl Crawford and the Red Sox had just agreed to a seven-year, $142 million contract.

(Because of length, this is just PART of Aaron’s article on Carl Crawford. To read the rest, please click here or visit www.aarontorres-sports.com.)

Wait, what?

I had literally read a half an hour before that Crawford to the Angels was a done deal—that all that was left to consummate the deal was dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Was Crawford to the Sox for real?

Quickly I flipped on SportsCenter and saw nothing. I checked ESPN.com, and all that was showing up was the archaic Crawford to the Angels article from 20 minutes before. MLB Network had nothing. But as the night rolled on, the tweets just kept piling up, and apparently Carl Crawford was going to be a Red Sock.

One of my favorite players had just signed on to play for my favorite team, yet as I flipped off the lights and rolled around in bed, I’ve got to admit that the signing left me a bit uneasy.

Let me explain.  

On the one hand, I’m a Red Sox fan. That means a lot of things, but in relevance to this column, what’s most important is that I’ve seen Crawford play quite a bit over these last half-dozen years. With that said, the Crawford signing has me excited. Okay, I’m beyond excited. Truthfully, I haven’t been this tingly inside since the night of my senior prom.

The Red Sox just acquired one of the 10 most exciting athletes in professional sports, and one of the two or three most exciting in baseball. Hands down. Crawford is a physical freak with enough raw athleticism to have been recruited to play both football at Nebraska and basketball at UCLA. Instead he chose baseball to put food on the table, despite having barely played the sport in high school.

Since then, Crawford has evolved into one of the seven wonders of the baseball world, to the point that at 29 years old, his former manager in Tampa, Joe Maddon, has said that Crawford is just now reaching his full potential. Not bad for a guy who’s stolen at least 45 bases in six of the last seven years and hit over .300 in five of them.

But looking at the raw stats doesn’t do justice to how fun it is just to watch him. Every Crawford at-bat is “must see,” simply because he can turn a poorly played single into a double, and a double in the gap into a triple. Every time Crawford reaches base, it’s the kind of excitement Red Sox fans haven’t seen since Manny Ramirez was stumbling around left field like a drunken sailor.

Crawford once stole six bases in one game, and I was personally watching him one night when he stole home…standing up, mind you.

Now I get to watch him upwards of 160 times next year. I feel like a kid whose parents gave him a brand new car on his 16th birthday. What did I do to deserve this?

Unfortunately, with all that said, there’s always a “but.” In this case, the “but” comes in those mixed emotions I mentioned before. Because as exciting as this Crawford signing is for me personally, I can’t help but think that it’s terrible for baseball.

Seriously, the Red Sox just spent (a justified) $142 million on Crawford, thumping Anaheim’s bid by an extra year and close to $30 million over the length of the contract. That came on the heels of Boston acquiring Adrian Gonzalez and doling out a seven-year extension that’s going to pay a reported $23 million a year.

Now I’m not a math major, but if my calculations are correct, that’s close to $300 million through 2017…for two guys! Which leads to my next question: Is Theo Epstein running a baseball team or the U.S. Treasury?

It’s not like Theo hasn’t spent money recently either. This is a guy who handed a $40 million extension to a soon to be 30-year-old Josh Beckett in spring training last March. Granted, that signing wouldn’t have been that bad, except Beckett was throwing 89 mph fastballs that at the time could barely break a pane of glass, let alone an opposing hitter’s bat. Yet there was Theo throwing $40 million at him.

A few months prior, the Red Sox gave John Lackey $80 million to be their No. 3 starter.

Now I want to make it clear that I’m not complaining. As a fan, ultimately, all you can ask for from ownership is to put the most compelling and competitive team on the field possible. I get why the Red Sox gave each and every guy the money they did, even if I didn’t agree with all of it.

If the Red Sox hadn’t swooped in with a huge check for Crawford, they ran the risk of losing him to the Yankees like they did Mark Teixeira two years ago. If they hadn’t traded for Gonzalez, they ran the risk of having God knows who playing one of the corner infield positions. If they hadn’t extended Beckett in the spring, he might have blown up during the regular season, which would’ve pushed his price tag up.

To stay competitive in the current climate, these are moves that had to be made. Again, I’m not complaining, and I’m not pointing fingers.  

But at the same time, is the Red Sox throwing around money like this good for baseball?

Look, we’ve known for a long time that the business model of the sport is broken, and I hate to be the 8,217th sportswriter to bring that up. Still, how is the Red Sox spending this much money good for the game? How is it fiscally healthy when Boston trumped one of the other “big spenders” for Crawford by over $30 million? How is it good when two teams are playing by a completely different set of rules than everyone else?

People have been saying for years that baseball is about the “haves” and “have-nots,” but really that’s too simplistic. Baseball has turned into a caste system, with the Red Sox and Yankees at the top, Philadelphia, the Mets, Cubs and Angels in the middle and everybody else picking up the scraps. How is that good for anyone?

Now, I know this has all been a problem for a while now. I get it. But really, things haven’t been this bad for nearly as long as most people think…

(Because of length, this is just PART of Aaron’s article on the Carl Crawford signing. To read the remainder, please click here or visit www.aarontorres-sports.com.

Also, be sure to follow Aaron on Twitter @Aaron_Torres.)

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