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Green Is Unsure of Decision

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Presley Green is on the telephone, or near enough so her soft sobs are audible.

“What is it, honey?” her dad whispers.

Sniff.

“Want to watch TV?”

Then she is gone, padding away, maybe in those little pajamas with the feet in them, her worries smothered by dad’s gentle voice.

“Sorry,” Shawn Green says into the phone, a small laugh follows, and he resumes a conversation more complicated, a decision unsolved by simple distraction.

He was traded from the Dodgers on Monday. Today, and for at most two days beyond, Green will choose whether he will go along with it.

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He could stay.

Contractually, he could.

But, really now, why would he?

Two months ago, with a year left on his contract, Green and his agent asked the Dodgers if they would consider an extension. They offered to defer some of next season’s salary -- a good part of $16 million -- if it would help Frank McCourt sign Adrian Beltre, or a free-agent pitcher, or whomever.

Green and his agent, obviously, had been reading the newspapers.

And now, starting today, they’ll pick up that dialogue with a different owner, a different general manager, in a different place.

A Tustin kid, a Dodger man, Green pushes questions around like cold peas on a plastic Peter Rabbit plate.

He had all of these Dodger dreams. The Dodgers want him to go.

There are negotiations to think about, procedure to protect, the no-trade clause, the contract extension to be held by an organization he hardly knows, one that lost 111 times a season ago.

He is a good man whose price got too high, whose swing got too measured, whose bat got too unpredictable. The best players in the game, Beltre, for one, were getting $13 million a year, and Green, sadly for everyone, hasn’t been one of them for a while.

It doesn’t mean he won’t be again. He is 14 months out of shoulder surgery, three months out of a second-coming second half, but the Dodgers had their plans, and he wasn’t in them.

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“It’s been,” he says, seemingly picking a word from hundreds, “unsettling.”

The Greens are in Irvine now, Shawn, Lindsay and 2-year-old Presley. They figured they’d be there, oh, forever.

They have 48 hours to decide whether forever includes the Arizona Diamondbacks, another town, fitting in again.

Who’ll be there to catch the batting gloves?

“I honestly don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to go into it with an open mind. I want to make sure I make a good decision with all the facts.”

It shouldn’t take long, really. His shoulder is fine. His new boss is his old agent, contract expansion perhaps awkward but quite attainable.

And then, probably, he’ll go, because his soon-to-be former franchise needs his money, needs a pitcher or two, and says it believes in a first baseman seven years and a couple of All-Star games his junior.

These things happen.

At the peak of his career, he was traded from Toronto. At 32, he’s on the verge of moving again.

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He’d seen the reports, even talked to McCourt about them a couple of weeks ago. No promises, though.

So, he braced himself, figured something was coming, knowing, he said chuckling, sportswriters get things right “once in a while.”

It would be bad business to say goodbye now. He has a contract to negotiate, his only option being to trudge back to the Dodgers, hold them to an agreement reached a few general managers ago, and play in a uniform being measured for somebody else.

It’s not great leverage; it’s all he has.

“I don’t really want to speculate either way,” he says. “This week is going to be, well, I guess I’m taking it for what it’s worth. I understand both teams have different priorities. It’s my job to evaluate which situation is going to be the best.”

He likes Jeff Moorad, who was his agent until Moorad bought into the Diamondbacks and became their chief executive, pending approval from Major League Baseball. It will help that his is a familiar face, belonging to a man Green described as “brilliant.”

“I know anything he’s involved in is going to be a success,” he says. “That said, I have to make sure that situation is right for me.”

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It’s not this one. Maybe that will be enough.

So, the question comes, dressed in blue, decorated in opening-day bunting: What became of happily-ever-after?

“Don’t write me off like I’m already gone,” he says, “but I so appreciate the people who supported me in L.A. Maybe that’ll continue. Maybe it won’t. Time will tell.”

Behind him, through the telephone, there is laughter.

“OK,” Shawn Green says, a little weary now. “I’ll see ya.”

And then he is gone.

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