It’s Getting Totally Out of Control

News item: Catcher Ivan Rodriguez signs $42-million contract with Texas Rangers. Figure represents a compromise on the $45 million he originally sought.

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We take you now to the year 2015 and the sports page news of that day:

NEW YORK--Ripper Spleen, Yankee infielder, inked a new pact with the club yesterday that calls initially for a bonus payment of Rhode Island followed by substantial seaside acreage in Florida. Spleen also gets 50% of a gold mine in South Africa, but he withdrew his demands for the country of Fiji. Ripper batted .217 last season, which represents the fifth consecutive season he has batted over .200.

Spleen also cut down his errors to two a game last season, encouraging his manager, Jesse Outman, to observe: “Ripper actually threw out a runner two consecutive times last year. We need his glove in there too!”

Spleen was penalized four innings for spitting on an umpire who had called him out on strikes. “What was wrong with the pitch?” reporters wanted to know. “Too slow,” Spleen said.

CHICAGO--Junkman Jones, the last of the knuckleball pitchers, signed with the White Sox over the weekend after lengthy negotiations for a purported $200 million. Jones led the club last season with a 7-22 record and an earned-run average of 14.70.

“Junk actually struck out five batters a month,” his general manager, Spender Thrift, reported. “And he cut down his walks to two per inning and only walked in the winning run three times last season.”

He added: “There are not many 20-game losers in the game of baseball anymore. You have to be a good pitcher to lose 20 games.”

The contract stipulates he is to be given Fifth Avenue and the deed to the Wrigley Building if he ever throws a shutout. If he throws a no-hitter, he gets a yacht. For every game he lasts into the sixth inning, he gets the keys to the city--literally.

MIAMI--Two billion-dollar teams played in the World Series for the first time today as the Florida Marlins, with a payroll of $1.7 billion, met the New York Yankees, with a payroll of $1.3 billion. The Marlins barely outlasted the “Cinderella team,” the Pittsburgh Pirates, who finished only one game out of first with a miserly payroll of $388 million. The opening game was played before an enthusiastic turnout of 111 fans, some of whom carried signs reading, “If I wanted to support multimillionaires, I’d take up a collection for the Rockefellers.”

ABC was in the last year of its $4.5-billion contract with baseball to televise the games but said the contests would be shown on tape delay so as not to conflict with the daytime soap operas or the evening movie-of-the-week. Sponsors this year are truss ads and the Lease-A-New-Yugo licensee.

DETROIT--The NFL’s Lions took a big step in shoring up their offense when they signed college phenom “Four Yard” Finnegan to a no-cut contract calling for him to get an oil field in Saudi Arabia, a job for his father on the board of directors of IBM, a cheerleader of his choice, all the bail money he requires and the free services of F. Lee Bailey Jr. for a year.

“He brings a kind of excitement to the franchise that’s been lacking. He’ll put pro football on Page 1,” predicted his coach, Ol’ Bo Constrictor.

Old Four Yard was as good as his word when he put the team on Page 1 for kicking a woman down five flights of stairs and breaking three of her ribs and her ankle. Finnegan got three weeks of community service on a no-contest plea on condition he give the judge an autographed football and two tickets to the Raider game.

“They threw the book at me!” Finnegan complained. Intimates said it was the only book Finnegan ever got close to, although he graduated cum laude. The professors would have made him Phi Beta Kappa, but they didn’t know what he looked like, only what his number was. Fourteen students who were denied admission because Four Yard got the last available spot in the matriculation said they were “glad to be of service--after all, he won us the Sugar Bowl!”

“He’s the kind of young man this team needs,” said the club owner, Owner Sapp Head III.

LAS VEGAS--Lysander Jollymeal won the heavyweight championship of the world posthumously tonight when his opponent, Bite Bison, was disqualified for breaking the Marquess of Queensbury rules against Jollymeal. He ate him.

“I thought there was something wrong when I went to Jollymeal’s corner to tell him I had deducted a point-and-a-half from Bison’s count for biting his ear off and I found Lysander had disappeared. Then, when Bison belched, I knew what had happened,” referee Knott Toobright explained.

“Another black eye for boxing!” sighed the Athletic Commission’s Noah Rocketscientist. When the call came for boxing to be abolished, Rocketscientist protested “Fatalities are a part of the game! People die in auto racing too! It’s a risk you take!”

“Exactly!” Bison said. “I got a family to feed!”

Someone said he was glad he didn’t just take Jollymeal home to them.