I sat glued to the television most of Monday night. Not so much interested in watching the 49ers beat up on the suddenly hapless Cardinals, instead focused on the never-ending scroll at the bottom of the screen. I was intrigued by a couple of reports coming off a burner on baseball’s hot stove. The first was that the Red Sox were going to sign John Lackey, the second, and way more interesting, was that the Phillies were going to trade for Roy Halladay. Halladay and Cliff Lee I thought to myself, with those two at the top of their rotation Philadelphia would have to be the hands favorite to get back to the World Series next year. But not so fast.

I’m sure you already know, but in case you don’t, the Phillies had worked out a separate deal to ship Cliff Lee to Seattle in exchange for some prospects. Immediately I had to know why. Why would a team give up what would be the best tandem of pitchers in baseball before they had even toed the rubber one time on back-to-back nights? Why would the Phillies essentially trade Lee for Halladay? I don’t see that as making them any better? Why? Why? Why? It was not until later in the evening that this madness was explained to me. Turns out Lee will be a free agent next year and he wants more money than the Phillies want to spend. Halladay on the other hand is so happy to get away from those perpetual dogs, the Toronto Blue Jays, he is willing to ink a long-term extension just to get the deal done. Thus, they have replaced their short-term ace with a long-term solution. Makes sense I suppose.

It makes perfect sense in a sports world that often, because of how much money is thrown around, often makes little sense. It seems to me that as time passes this financial aspect is becoming more and more what the athletes care about and that’s a real shame. Think about the whole Tiger Woods’ mess. There was far more talk about how much money he could lose in endorsements rather than talk about Tiger as a golfer and how it might affect him on the course. Tiger is the world’s first billion dollar athlete and for some reason that’s supposed to mean something to the rest of us. Not that he’s the world’s best golfer (which he obviously is) but that he has way more money than you or I will probably ever see in this or the next lifetime. There have been similar stories about LeBron James and his desire to earn a billion dollars. I honestly think I have read more stories about how much money LeBron wants to make than I have about how many titles he wants to win. I’m not sure what that makes you think about him, but it makes me think he’s kind of got his priorities backwards.

I would say there is little we can do about this money gone wild, but I don’t think that’s really the case. I’m not going to begrudge the athletes their money and you certainly can’t stop the owners from collecting their gate receipts. I just wonder if somehow we can’t just not pay as much attention to it. By all means celebrate a guy like Tiger when he wins a major, cheer on LeBron if he ever wins a title and love all your baseball players for what they do on the field as opposed to the money they make off of it. But when it comes time for the money side of the game, maybe we can stop talking about it so much. After all we watch to see how these guys perform on the field, not how they sign their name on the back of their paycheck.