"The highest we can go is 2 years, $20 million." "Okay, okay, okay...I'll lower my demands to six years, $60 million. What?"

You gotta hand it to MLB free agents. The economy's in a free fall and non-Yankee owners aren't paying jack shit to anybody...but the jobless rigourously stick to their original demands, rigidly standing their ground against ideas like "compromise" or "adjusting for the market" or "holy fucking shit people are killing themselves and their entire families because of this economic crisis and you're still fucking demanding $14 million a year when you hit .230 last season." Some team comes in with an offer like 2 years, $45 million, which will make you richer than 99% of the rest of the people in the world? What an insult! It's 6 years/$150 million or nothin', pal!

This has been going on the entire winter, obviously, but I'm just now posting about it because one of my favorite salary-related stories broke this afternoon. Bobby Abreu, the guy who the Yankees declined to offer arbitration to and then basically said they didn't want, nevertheless believed that he deserved a 3-year, $48-million contract in November. In the two months since then, various teams have offered him contracts, usually in the 1-2 year range with an overall dollar value probably less than half of the $48 million he wanted, and therefore he's rejected them all. Today, he came out and said that he'd be willing to sign for less. Well, better late than never, I guess. Now he's just got to call the Mariners and say "yes" to that offer of like 2 years and $18 million or so, right?

Wrong. Apparently, Abreu has graciously lowered his demands to 3 years and $33 million:

http://insider.espn.go.com/mlb/features/rumors

This offseason, I would have taken Pat Burrell over Bobby Abreu in a nanosecond, and Burrell got 2 years and $16 million. Apparently Abreu thinks his lesser offensive skills and slightly better defensive skills are worth double that. Stay classy, Bob, and remember how you once reluctantly, begrudgingly agreed to drop your salary from $16 million a year to $11 million a year the next time you watch a news story about a father killing himself and his six children because he lost his 80-hour-a-week job at the local warehouse. Trust me, what you do (basically playing a little kid's game for the entertainment of others) is unbelievably important in the grand scheme of things.