Tavares: Pedroia's extension a bright spot for baseball

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By Nick Tavares

July 28, 2013 12:00 AM

Last week, Ryan Braun was put away for the rest of 2013 thanks to his ties to a clinic that passed out drugs of all kinds to athletes.

At the same time, Alex Rodriguez has played Richard Nixon to Braun's Spiro Agnew, ducking and weaving as baseball chases the crown jewel of the steroid-fueled justice brigade.

It's dominated sports talk on radio and cable, I imagine. It's hard to say for sure, as I've tuned out as much of it as possible.

I can't begin to express how bored and exhausted I am with the drug scandals that continue to plague baseball coverage. For as much gravity as they're given in the media, I can't make myself care about the fates of Rodriguez or Braun or whether they've burned their tickets to the Hall of Fame. I don't see how or why it matters.

What matters, plainly, are the players that are left playing and what level of commitment and entertainment they bring to the game. When they're put away for breaking the rules, it's hard to see the point in paying them any further mind.

To dwell on scandal is to ignore the work that baseball has done to clean up the game. It ignores the tornado that Yasiel Puig has created in pushing the Dodgers back up the standings in the National League West. It ignores how the Oakland A's have played all season in proving that last year's division title wasn't a fluke. It ignores the jobs Joe Maddon and David Price have done in keeping Tampa Bay relevant.

And, back here, it ignores the story of how the Red Sox continue to steward their ship in the right direction, locking up second baseman Dustin Pedroia with a contract extension that will keep him in Fenway Park until 2021.

The mechanics of the deal are pretty plain. The Red Sox get a team leader who is arguably the best in baseball at his position, offensively and defensively, for the rest of his career. Pedroia gets stability, both financially (he'll have some payments deferred until 2028) and in knowing that Boston will be home until he's in his late 30s.

So here's a good story to come out of baseball this week, but it's not the only one. To say that Pedroia is a breath of fresh air carries the weight that baseball is stuck in the fog of scandals and selfish parties, and that's not necessarily true.

Rodriguez, Braun and the rest are, finally, a very small portion of the baseball bunch. Where they were likely the majority even just 10 years ago, they're now on the fringes and footnotes to the real stories.

So when a player like Pedroia signs a contract extension like the one he has, it's recognition of finding the sweet spot, where the team and the player have trust and actually feel they need each other. They each see the benefit of staying in the same arrangement. And there's trust there.

Not all players stay with one team their entire careers, or even most of their careers. So many things have to go right for it to happen. Sometimes it looks like a good fit, as with Felix Hernandez and the Mariners or Joe Mauer and the Twins. Sometimes, the Yankees sign Rodriguez for 10 years and the Brewers extend Braun through 2020.

But Pedroia's taking his shot at it. And if he's right, and the team's right, and it keeps working, it's going to be a fun decade in Boston baseball.

With so many great stars and stories, it'll likely be a great era for the game, anyway. It'll be nice to keep some of that here on the local dial.

Nick Tavares' column appears Sundays in the Standard-Times and at SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached at nick@nicktavares.com

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