INDIANAPOLIS -- Here's the world in which we live today:
The Detroit Tigers, due to financial pressure, essentially were forced to trade Curtis Granderson to the Yankees in a mega three-team deal Tuesday while keeping Miguel Cabrera.
Now, understanding that they're different players, and Cabrera produces more offense. ...
Granderson was highly popular among Tigers fans, a pillar of the community in Detroit and an incredibly impressive representative for both the Tigers and major league baseball.
He is signed to a five-year, $30.25 million deal through 2013.
Cabrera, on the final weekend of the season with the Tigers fighting to hang onto a shrinking AL Central lead that they would eventually lose, stayed out all night drinking and was picked up by police at 6 a.m. on a Saturday on a domestic dispute call. Cabrera, according to police, had a blood-alcohol level of .26 and police named both Cabrera and his wife as aggressors in the assault.
Tigers general manager Dave Dombrowski picked Cabrera up at the police station early that morning, and the slugger then went hitless in his next two games -- which, as things played out, were Detroit's two most important games of the season.
He is signed to an eight-year, $152.3 million deal through 2015.
The Tigers blew a three-game AL Central lead with four games to play in 2009, and now, as a few bad contracts (Dontrelle Willis, Nate Robertson) and the poor Michigan economy squeeze them, they must cut costs.
Granderson was a beloved figure in Detroit, and now he's gone.
Cabrera, after a spectacularly selfish act that undoubtedly hurt the Tigers as the playoff race culminated, after essentially flipping off die-hard Tigers fans -- many of whom are either struggling to stay employed or already laid off -- remains. Largely because, with his contract, he's virtually untradable.
It's just the way it is. The sports world today, hard at work.
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