Might as well start off my 16th year of “looking at obituaries and which coaches got fired“.
Ryne Sandberg. 65 seems a lot younger to me these days than it did in the past. MLB. Baseball Reference.
This amused me: the context is that Mr. Sandberg signed a contract in 1992 that paid him $28.4 million over four years, which was a lot of money at the time.
As Sports Illustrated put it at the time: “Sandberg is a shy, unassuming guy who is a lock for the Hall of Fame. He doesn’t drink, test positive, ram his wife’s car, kick the dog, walk out of camp or say dumb things to the press. The most controversial thing he does is boot a grounder every 25 games or so.”
On signing the extension, Sandberg remarked, “My face will be sore today from the smile.”
But other club owners weren’t grinning. “I’ve said for years that we’re headed for Armageddon,” Al Rosen, the general manager of the San Francisco Giants, told Sports Illustrated. “But now we’re past the gates. To the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Famine, Pestilence, Death and War — we have added a fifth: Unmitigated Greed. It’s going to do us all in. I can’t see baseball surviving this.”