Texas Rangers slugger Prince Fielder’s career is reportedly over after 12 years in Major League Baseball.
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Fielder kept his spirits up despite the sadness of retiring, and was even able to deftly fend off one of the stupidest questions ever, with a reporter asking Fielder, “Do you understand what Lou Gehrig was going through in his famous speech?”
If he ever runs out of Kleenex fielder will still have plenty of paper laying around as he’s still owed $104 million on his contract.
The Rangers would receive some sort of monetary relief, assuming they had Fielder’s contract insured – The Dallas Morning News reported the Rangers had 50 percent coverage, so would receive $9 million yearly per the terms of said policy – but the Tigers will not.
Texas Rangers’ Prince Fielder, left, wipes his eyes as he sits by his son Haven during a news conference before a baseball game against the Colorado Rockies, Wednesday Aug. 10, 2016, in Arlington, Texas. The stout first baseman and designated hitter will finish this season at a career-low.212 with eight homers and 44 RBIs in 89 games. He would have finished with 319 home runs.
“I was thinking, how am I going to hit a fastball tomorrow?”, he said. Be more than the total team payroll for six of the teams in the league this season. He had his first neck surgery in June 2014, playing just 42 games that season. He played in 809 of 810 possible games from 2009-13 with Milwaukee and Detroit, after playing at least 157 games each of the three seasons before that.
Fielder, who wore a neck brace during the presser due to his recent surgery, said that his kids wouldn’t allow him to be upset. After just two years in the Motor City, he was traded to the Texas Rangers for second basemen Ian Kinsler.
“To just suddenly have the lights turned out like that. we’re pretty steadied and pretty prepared, but to get that phone call, I was really taken back”, Boras said.
Fielder is not a particularly athletic-looking ballplayer, so one of the dongs on his career spray chart will stand out more than the rest.
The Prince Fielder situation is also a warning to teams who sign veteran players to big-money free agent contracts, especially one-dimensional players with bodies that tend not to age well.
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Fielder, who has named after the late Minnesota singer, walks away with a successful career that spanned 12 seasons.
