Jeff Passan with a fresh take on Alex Rodriguez.

If Jeff Passan was owed $100 million, I suspect he'd fight to collect it:

"This always was going to be about the money, you know. Some of Alex Rodriguez's associates like to tell stories about Alex and his money, how it's at the root of this whole mess he's in now, how all this talk about his love of baseball and desire to be a role model for his children is a smokescreen for the greed that consumes him. He's made $315 million playing baseball, and that's not enough. 

Some of it vanished in real-estate deals gone bad. More of it disappeared as it tends to when entourages swell and ten grand here or a hundred grand there is like the rest of us tossing a couple bucks into the Salvation Army kettle at Christmas. A-Rod is still filthy rich, in no financial danger whatsoever, but that's not the point."

Can I stop right now?

Or am I going to read this entire column and then realize there is no point?


"In this case, he wants to salvage as much as he can of the $100 million or so remaining on his contract with the New York Yankees before Major League Baseball disciplines him for using performance-enhancing drugs, lying about it and a litany of other offenses. That – not this cockamamie burning desire to come back and play baseball – is the grand imperative of his haggling sessions with MLB, two associates of Rodriguez's told Yahoo! Sports. He wants to take his money, he wants to screw the Yankees because he feels like they ditched him and he wants to become a property mogul, buying and selling, wheeling and dealing, away from the sport that turned on him despite everything he did for it."

I think he loves money and he also loves playing baseball. He also loves muscular women and and performance-enhancing drugs.


"Within the next 72 hours, Alex Rodriguez will make his choice to fight or surrender. For a while now, one person close to him has suggested that his decision-making skills are so bad that they oughta let ol' Mr. Murphy off the hook and make it A-Rod's Law: whatever can go wrong will go wrong. No matter what he chooses, the truth is it already has."

I hope he fights and, at the very least, takes down Selig with him. Because if Selig goes to federal court with a proposed $100 million penalty based upon the testimony of a paid-off drug dealer, then ARod is going to win.

As for the shocking notion that ARod is greedy, the column is about 15 years too late.