And one can understand the roots of his desire to give his son the privileges of a baseball-centric youth – his own father, former MLB player Dave LaRoche, used to bring him and his brothers to the ballparks during his coaching days with the White Sox.
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So this whole fuss over Chicago’s Adam LaRoche being told not to bring his kid to the yard every day, his subsequent one-tweet retirement because of it, and the near boycott of a spring training game over all of it, seems odd. Even if not, Williams is not going to blast a 14-year-old in the media even if he is a rude garbage son, so he’s playing this perfectly. He merely asserted that having kids around could become a problem and that there should be a policy giving the team the right to limit it.
In doing so, the 36-year-old slugger is walking away from the final year of a contract that would have paid him $13 million in 2016.
Williams has said repeatedly that he likes the kid, that the decision was in the spirit of allowing the White Sox, who made several upgrades during the offseason, to focus on improving last season’s 76-86 mark and compete for a playoff spot. Ace Chris Sale reportedly went off on team president Kenny Williams during a meeting in which Williams discussed the team’s stance regarding Adam LaRoche and his son.
Now a big league team doesn’t want LaRoche’s son in the clubhouse. A day later, when Clark visited the Dodgers while making his rounds as the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Assn., he said he still had not heard back. This would make the second time in maybe 12 years. I even appreciate that there are kids at school they don’t get along with. “Drake would clean cleats, he would help out in drills, pick up baseballs when we needed, he didn’t say boo to anybody and was never a trouble in the clubhouse”.
That led to Williams speaking with LaRoche, who hit only.
“As you might expect, Adam’s taking a deep breath amid everything that’s gone on”, Clark said at Camelback Ranch. “That’s thousands of hours of time we missed together, and Drake and I get to spend it together”. It’s unfortunate. But talk about a quality decision, a life decision and a family decision. “I think it has a lot to do with staying focused and being an appropriate environment for a child or a teenager”.
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Williams emphasized that he thought “it’s great” to have kids around a team.
