On Tuesday March 20, 2012, Lance Berkman accused Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig of extorting the Houston Astros organization... but he plays for the St. Louis Cardinals. Why does he care?
The St. Louis Cardinals roster last season included notables Matt Holliday, David Freese, Yadier Molina and oh yeah some guy named Albert Pujols. Yet arguably the player that had the best and biggest impact on the season last year was the ol' reliable Lance Berkman. No doubt, this upcoming year there will be exponentially more weight on Lance Berkman's shoulders to carry the load left behind with Albert Pujols's bat moving west.
Although Lance Berkman had an incredible 2011 season in which he batted at a clip of .301 smacked 31 home runs and drove in 94 RBI's those are all dazzling numbers; but most impressive was his .412 OBP which was nearly .50 points higher than Albert Pujols's and good enough for 5th best in all of MLB. 2011 batting statistics.
Regardless of his impressive 2011 campaign, I believe that the increased burden placed on his 36 year old shoulder to carry the St. Louis Cardinals hopes and dreams this season will wear down his body over the162 game season. Therefore i believe that Lance Berkman's career is winding down and will unfortunately end much more abruptly than people anticipate. I also mention this because in May of 2009 he said he would like to coach at the University of Texas (although he attended Rice university). Berkman is hopeful that current UT head coach Augie Garrido will hang up his clip board around the same time he strings up his cleats, "I know Garrido's going to coach four or five more years. I figured that might dovetail nicely with the end of my career" (Quote from 2009).
All this being said, i strongly believe that Lance Berkman is calling out the commissioner for "extorting" the Houston Astros because he's relishing in all those old memories that he created over his 12 seasons in an Astros uniform. Obviously Nostalgia has played a major trick on poor Lance Berkman's mind.
Poor Mr. Berkman is obviously entranced in his memories of being a very good if not dominant team in the early to mid part of the 2000's. A formidable team built around the smooth swinging Lance Berkman, the crouching legend that was Jeff Bagwell, the human pinata Craig Biggio, and the raging Roger Clemens. in 2005, this nucleus propelled the Astros to their only World Series appearance in franchise history where they were swept by the Chicago White Sox in four games.
Lance is lost in those glory days, in the early part of the century when the Houston Astros were relevant. He seems to have forgotten that the Houston Astros almost lost two times as many games last year as they won, their record at the end of the season was a dismal 56-106. The team was so bad that it seems they were unanimously volunteered by the other 29 major league teams to be dispatched to the AL, although the Astro's have had their roots in Houston and the NL since their inception in 1962 as the Houston Colt .45's.
The reason Lance Berkman believes that Bud Selig 'extorted' the Houston Astros is because the commissioner wouldn't approve the sale of the franchise to a new ownership group until they agreed to switch to the AL west from the NL central. Ok the new owner got a cool $65 million dollar mail in rebate for switching leagues but that's not the point. Lance Berkman is entranced in the glory days of the organization that he doesn't realize that Houston Astros will be one of the worst teams in baseball for the foreseeable future... Just take a look at their roster, i recognized a total of 6 names that i can for sure say is a big league ball player Houston Astros roster.
Interesting take on the story. I wrote about the same issue and thought it was a good example of the MLB being just as much of a business as a game. I think both points can exist at the same time. I don't think there's anything wrong with claiming that Berkman is feeling a bit tender towards his "glory days". It's not like the business transaction made him lose any money, at least to my knowledge.
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