Yesterday in Minnesota, God played a cruel trick on Phil Hughes. Hughes was cruising along through 8 innings in his start against the Arizona Diamondbacks. He had thrown just 96 pitches and was most certainly going back out for the 9th, in this, his last start of 2014.
But that's when the skies opened up and rain delayed the game for 66 minutes. Hughes would not return. He needed to record just one more out to bring his season total to 210 IP, and trigger a $500,000 incentive bonus.
Save your, "Oh, poor millionaire baseball player" bit and make this relevant in your life by subtracting zeroes. Hughes makes $8,000,000 this year. Take two zeroes away and call it $80,000. If you were making $80K and just lost out on a $5,000 bonus, would you be perturbed? Yeah, me too.
I had a similar experience playing in Japan in 2008. I had "games pitched" incentives in my contract and one was 40 games pitched for $50,000. With one week to go in the season, my team, the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, was mathematically eliminated from reaching the post season.
My manager at the time was the legendary Sadaharu Oh, he of 868 career home runs. Mr. Oh decided that since we were out of it he would deactivate all the foreign players and send us home, allowing younger players to get some experience over the final seven games of the season.
I had 39 games pitched at the time.
Bitter? Believe it. Baseball has been good to me and my family and has given us a nice head start in life, but not to the point where I'm OK unnecessarily missing out on a $50K bonus.
I thought about talking to Mr. Oh about this and asking to pitch in one more game. I didn't and I regret that about three times a year.
Tough break for Phil Hughes, but yes, he'll be OK.
