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 It may not have been the largest deal we covered in 2000, but the $252 million signing of Alex Rodriguez by the Tom Hicks-owned Texas Rangers is still one of the most memorable from that year.Seattle Mariners shortstop Alex Rodriguez was the most coveted free agent during the 2000 off-season, with every deep-pocketed major league baseball team in the hunt to sign him. The Dodgers, Rockies, Braves, Yankees and Mets were serious suitors, although the Queens-based franchise eventually dropped out of the bidding, claiming Rodriguez's contract demands made him more of a distraction than an asset.
Hicks extinguished any distracting bids with his $252 million offer, by
far the largest contract ever offered for a player at that time. In
fact, Rodriguez's $25 million per year annual salary was a 47% markup from
baseball's previous richest yearly package: $17 million for the Blue
Jays' Carlos Delgado.
But as David Carey wrote, Hicks and his buyout firm Hicks Muse Tate & Furst Inc. was known for its high-spending ways. "Some ... point to the torrents of cash Hicks Muse has bestowed on numerous telecom, Internet and bricks-and-mortar companies this year and last, often at lofty multiples. Already, several have tanked or are in trouble -- such as ICG Communications, Teligent and Rhythms NetConnections. Hicks Muse has sunk a whopping $1.2 billion into those and other telcos alone." The munificent Rodriguez deal stuck a chord with one buyout player. He recounted the "strange" experience he had selling a holding to one of Hicks Muse's companies. "As a bargaining tactic, we offered to sell for an amount we thought was high. We expected them to talk us down. They didn't even try; they just said, 'Done!' " Rodriguez has since established one of the finest careers in baseball history, winning three MVP awards and hitting over 40 home runs per season eight times. But the legacy of that $252 million deal lives on. Rodriguez became the poster boy for overpriced, pampered ballplayers. And now, he may become the emblem of the baseball age's most serious scandal: performance enhancing drugs. Rodriguez was forced to admit that he took illegal stimulants between 2000 and 2002 after a Sports Illustrated report revealed his failed drug tests from that time. Rodriguez cited the pressure to perform following that mammoth Hicks contract as one of the factors in his decision to use performance-enhancing drugs. Rodriguez was traded from Texas to the Yankees in February of 2004, and a month later, Tom Hicks retired from Hicks Muse. Hicks stated he left Hicks Muse to focus on his sports holdings, but clearly he had also been burnt by the other abused and unregulated stimulant of the era: telecom investing. Besides their fateful deal of December 2000, Hicks and Rodriguez have one other thing in common: Neither man has ever won a World Series. - Tom Groppe See "Hicks redefines grand slam" - December, 2000 Read Decade of The Deal Categories Deal Video
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