Behind the Green

by Gabe Souza
Editorial. Photos by AP News

With baseball season here and the buzz of spring training in the air, I thought it might be a good idea to have a refresher course on some A-Rod math.

Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees’ third baseman, is the highest paid baseball player in the history of the game. His initial contract with the Texas Rangers in 2000 paid the perennial All-star $250 million over ten years.

But with A-Rod being such a talented phenom – and lest we forget a proven steroid user – the Bronx Bombers decided to reward the former choke-artist with a new contract after his high-output postseason that helped the Yanks clinch their 27^th franchise world series last year.

His new deal is worth $275 million over the next ten years, making his salary for the 2010 season exactly $32 million dollars. That equates to $2,666,666 a month, $615,385 a week, $87,912 a day, $3,663 an hour, $60 a minute and $1 per second. Translate that into everyday living and A-Rod makes $600 for taking a ten-minute shower and almost 30 grand for a good night’s sleep.

By the time number 13 finishes his current contract, his total career earnings will probably sit around $560 million, not including endorsements and commercial advertising.

The guy is rolling in dough. Let’s take a look at a few things he could scrounge up with one year’s salary.

Keeping it trendy, James Cameron’s box-office hit Avatar set records around the world with the average ticket price for the 3-D “revolution” being $14.50. That means Rodriguez could buy the entire 2.2 million population of Houston, Texas a ticket to Cameron’s flick.

He could probably throw in some popcorn and soda too.

If you’re so inclined to eat more junk food, A-Rod could drown you in Twizzlers.

With the average bag of trademarked red liquorices spanning 24 feet when stacked end-to-end, Rodriguez could buy enough Twizzlers to wrap around the circumference of the earth twice – and then some.

That’s over 49,000 miles worth of red, sticky, gummy and chewy candy.

But let’s say that your needs go beyond that of $3 a bag candy. You need to update your technological arsenal.

Rodriguez could buy an entry-level iPad for every resident of Portland, Maine. That’s right, not your standard ipod, but Steve Job’s new, shiny and slick computerized love child.

Let’s shift focus a bit. Say the morning commute in your plain family sedan just isn’t cutting it for you anymore. Pavement is no longer your thing. You need something better. Something bigger. You need to take to the air.

Enter, Hood Blimp.

If you and a group of your friends petition the gold-glover and he’s not in a pissy mood of roid-rage, he could buy 16 Hood Blimps just like the ones that circle Fenway Park for you and your buds.

If you want to keep the aviation theme going and need to get a set of wings for some of your closest pals, A-Rod could whip out the cash to buy 28 single-engined Cessna airplanes. If you need the runway and maybe the airport, he could probably write a separate check for that.

But let’s not forget. Rodriguez isn’t that nice of a guy. He did stupidly pick a fight with Jason Varitek and tried to slap the ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove in a desperation move. Let’s face it; he’s probably not going to be giving out planes, trains and automobiles to the general public.

However, he may still have some work to do in the locker room. So, if his teammates are lucky, with his annual $32 million, A-Rod could buy each player on the 25-player major league roster a $1.2 million Bugatti Veyron supercar. And still probably make his mortgage payments.

Alright, enough with supercars. Let’s get to what some college students would care about.

With one year’s pay the Dominican native could finance full-scholarships for 500 Emerson College students and still have $11 million left to bathe with.

Or he could run down the street and rent out all 193 guest rooms and 43 suites at the Ritz-Carlton for three straight months without breaking a sweat.

If he wants to go on a spending splurge and impress his girlfriend, Rodriguez could skip the diamonds and go straight to the gold. 1,767 pounds of it that is.

But you know what, A-Rod is an American citizen. It’s about time he helped out government. We need some homeland defense from the third-baseman.

We’re super-pissed at Iran for having nuclear weapons so we need to show them what we’re made out of. They need to know that the Yankees’ third baseman could out-fund their entire uranium-based nuclear missile defense system.

The bombs that were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan on August 6, 1945 contained just over 141 pounds over uranium each according to the Federation of American Scientists' Web site.

At the current market price for uranium, A-Rod could finance the creation of 5,603 uranium-based nuclear weapons the same size of those dropped in the Orient. Talk about the Bronx Bombers.

That’s what I thought, Iran.

You can have some too, North Korea.

But let’s take care of our own people first before worrying about blowing the rest of the world to smithereens.

With one year’s salary, A-Rod could pay the salaries of all 100 US Senators as well as the President and his entire cabinet’s earnings.

Oh, and he’d still have $10 million left to play around with.

Since we’ve gone this far, let’s take a look at what the former shortstop could do with his entire baseball earnings over his career – near $600 million.

For starters, he could buy the entire John Hancock building in Boston based on its auction sale price earlier this decade. That’s 60 floors of prime Beantown real estate.

I’m sure mayor Tom Menino wouldn’t mind some help from the slick fielder, either. A-Rod’s career earnings could pay off one year of debt incurred on Massachusetts’ major highway project, “The Big Dig.”

Move up north a little bit and with one stroke of the pen, Rodriguez could wipe out more than half of the state of Maine’s debt.

Finally, he could finance slightly more than a quarter of the gross domestic product for the entire country of Sierra Leone.

Clearly, Rodriguez isn’t going to buy the Hancock tower or finance part of the big dig. But if these numbers don’t illustrate the need for a salary cap in baseball, then I don’t know what does.

Till then, maybe you could at least coax a top-of-the-line Rolex Day and Date President watch out of A-Rod. They’re only $18,000 a piece.

Chump change, right?