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player ready...This happened because he’s almost as scared as he is stupid. He’s a gifted giant who has always been a mental midget. He has had chance after chance to turn Jerrys Reinsdorf and Manuel into the bad guys, but he wouldn’t know PR from the CPR his image now needs or the RPR (revised payment right) that could turn him into a minimum-wage player.
Big Frank is and always will be a big loser. The White Sox explored trading him late in the 1999 season and should have traded him last spring. Instead they leaned on him all the way into October’s playoffs, when they predictably sank in his 270 pounds of gutless quicksand.
But along the way this organization sometimes took advantage of an enormously talented man-child who can be as pathetically gullible as Joe Louis was. Now Frank Thomas is attempting a hopeless holdout because–after his Big Hurt Enterprises turned into one big money-flushing toilet and his ex-wife took half of what’s left–he probably needs money and definitely wants out of a clause that could cause him short-term cash-flow embarrassment.
Imagine the White Sox owing Thomas only $250,000 a year, or 100 times less than Alex Rodriguez. That’s possible thanks to one of the most humiliating contracts any star has ever signed. Only recently has Thomas vaguely understood the Reinsdorfian RPR he agreed to in ’97. It certainly wouldn’t bankrupt him–not long term–but it could turn him into a leaguewide laughingstock.
The RPR states that if Thomas doesn’t make the All-Star team this season or finish in the top 10 of MVP voting, Reinsdorf can elect to pay him only $250,000 a year. Thomas hasn’t been an All-Star since ’97. Who knows if he can repeat last season’s MVP runner-up stats? If Reinsdorf sticks it to him, Thomas could shop himself as a free agent. But could a 33-year-old DH command the $10.3 million he’s scheduled to make from the Sox?
Even now his eight-bedroom, 13-bath mansion in Oak Brook–with its $90,000-a-year property taxes–is up for sale. Too much three-child support. Too little regard for advisers who could have helped turn him into something closer to Michael Jordan than Public Enemy No. 1.
Naturally, his new agents weren’t aware of Thomas’ lame-brained holdout scheme. But surely this mess began when former agent Robert Fraley, who died in the Payne Stewart plane crash, failed to talk Thomas out of signing his current contract.
Thomas had just won the ’97 batting title. Albert Belle had just made $11 million in his first Sox season. So why would Thomas, with only two years left on his deal, lock into a nine-year commitment that paid him only about $7 million in ’98, ’99 and 2000? Why an RPR for a future Hall of Famer?
Because this little big man can be such an impulsively insecure idiot.
If Thomas had developed the back-scratching rapport with the media that Cubs counterpart Mark Grace had, he could have vilified Reinsdorf. Suspiciously, Thomas wasn’t available for comment when his “lifetime” deal was announced.
If Frank would just be frank with reporters, instead of being so fearfully evasive, he also could have turned the town against Manuel when the second-year manager sent him home from Texas for refusing to pinch-hit. Thomas indicated he was injured. Media favorite Manuel got away with portraying Thomas as the weenie who cried wolf.
A walnut-sized calcium deposit was soon removed from Thomas’ ankle. A doctor who saw it told me, “Normal people couldn’t even walk with something like that.”
Yet Thomas’ potential Purple Heart remained lost in his no-heart image. When he showed up last spring with a doctor’s note excusing him from the dreaded shuttle sprints, Manuel lit into him.
This spring Manuel opened camp by turning from Genghis into Gandhi, saying new pitcher David Wells could just show up for Opening Day if he wanted. Elder statesman Thomas had every right to question publicly Manuel’s new special-treatment policy on a team that won with an all-for-one sacrifice.
Instead he walked out of camp. If he had been World Series MVP, he might be getting some public support. But Reinsdorf has quietly let Thomas twist in the talk-show wind. The longer he holds out, the more he risks a subpar season and $250,000 shame.
Now nobody has any sympathy for a guy who probably deserves a little.