Old man or man-child?

“That offer from the Giants was a lack of respect. A total disrespect,” Renteria told ESPNdeportes.com Thursday from Colombia.

“To play for a million dollars, I’d rather stay with my private business and share more time with my family,” he said. “Thank God I’m well off financially and my money is well invested.”

It may help if you realize that a dollar isn’t just a dollar, and once you start talking about millions or billions of them the character of a dollar changes in ways that far too few people realize. A dollar is blood, sweat, tears, time spent working instead of with one’s family, a finite and characterizable risk of death in the aggregate, indeed, lifeblood itself converted into currency. Taking a billion of them out of an economy is to doom people to fractionally shorter lives, for marginal people to be lost, and a lot of other very serious things much more important than whether Johnny gets to buy a videogame this week. The extinction of a species and ten billion dollars are far more comparable than you might care to admit, not because you overvalue the species, but because you undervalue the dollars. They’re not just scores in a game. They’re human life.