Sore loser vibes? After being relegated to minor league camp, pitcher Jordan Yamamoto opts to retire from baseball outright
Normally I tend to applaud when professional athletes up and retire on their own terms, because in my opinion it’s like them telling their respective sports and teams that they aren’t above them, and whatever bloating money they were making isn’t worth it, and that I dig that because I think professional sports organizations need to be taken down a peg or fifty every now and then.
But it really only has effect when the players in question that refuse to be a part of the machine and retire, were actually any good. Or were guys that were actually making substantial money to where it could be perceived as an insult to the team to think that someone would turn their nose up at rockstar money and put something as silly as their own personal lives above it.
So when a guy like Jordan Yamamoto, who I had to look up in order to find out who he was, decides to pull the vanishing act and retire from baseball outright instead of accepting his assignment to the Dodgers’ minor league camp, my first thoughts are, who? And that it must have been a tremendously slow news day in the world of the Dodgers if a guy like Jordan Yamamoto is making a headline at all.
I mean good on Jordan for believing in his own self-worth and thinking he’s too good to be in the minor leagues. The career 6.05 ERA and -0.3 bWAR at the major league level doesn’t agree with his assessment, but judgment by numbers are subjective anyway.
What really makes me question his judgment though is the fact that he’s still pretty young (26), and he hasn’t really been around a lot to have really earned enough money to where he might be able to really comfortably retire. Sure, he’s made enough appearances at the big league level to possibly have cracked $1M in earnings in his career, but after Uncle Sam has taken his cut of all of that, he’s still basically a guy that’s maybe made $450K over the last four years, which is actually less than my household income over the same span.
I get that he might feel slighted being sent to the minors and but even a Triple-A guy makes somewhere around $60-80K to play baseball for five months, and any time he gets called up to the big league squad, he’s making a prorated portion of the MLB league minimum which is currently around $775K. From a financial standpoint, I don’t feel like a guy like Jordan Yamamoto made the particularly best decision for his personal interests, unless he’s got a rock solid plan B in his back pocket for his career post-baseball.
Because if he’s not good enough for MLB, he’s definitely not good enough for NPB, even if his name is Yamamoto. Japanese hitters would dinky hit him to sepukku for his honor, and because his name is Yamamoto, no KBO team would want his inferior blood polluting any of their teams, so baseball is kind of off the table once he signs the papers to make his retirement official. He has no college education as he went straight to pro after high school, so I sure hope he is good with kids, because a little league instructional coach seems like the only career that might be left on the table unless he wants to, and can afford to, start from scratch.
Again, normally I like when professional athletes spontaneously retire out of the blue, because I like seeing teams and their fanbases squirm at the prospect of abruptly losing a key member of the squad. But I don’t think a guy like Jordan Yamamoto fits that bill, and without this slow news day article, I don’t think anyone in Dodgers Nation is hardly going to even notice his departure, much less the team’s bookkeeper, so I’m left with no other opinion than wondering if he made the smartest move, which I’m definitely leaning towards probably not.
Sorry not sorry, Jordan.
