I would like to think.

What's it like to make so much money that your biggest financial worry is... umm.... well... you really never—N E V E R—have financial worries? I can't put myself in the shoes of that person. Can't even put myself into the shoestrings of that person. And I doubt that I ever will, which is fine.

Albert Pujols knows what it's like, though. And yet he's due for a raise. He's currently making $16 million a year. That's over a million a month. A MONTH!!! And this will come as no surprise to any of you: he's not even close to the highest paid baseball player today. Now, based solely on his statistics and performance, he absolutely positively 100 percent deserves to be. The. Highest. Paid. Player. In. Baseball. I do not argue that.

But what happens when the guy who currently holds that title should not hold that title, or at least should not be making what he's making? Alex Rodriguez makes $27.5 million a year over with those crazy, overpayin' Yankees. Do the math on that real quick and you see that he's making in just over a couple weeks what Pujols can only manage to scrounge in a month.

Look, I don't mean for this to be a monologue on how baseball salaries are off the charts ridiculous. Plenty of iInk has been spilled on that topic. I have always said that teachers and doctors should be the best compensated individuals in our society, but our society is all out of whack in so many ways, and I'm just not smart enough to dissect that whole mess.

My unease with this Pujols debacle is pigheadedness. The Yankees obligated themselves to pay Rodriguez that insane amount of scratch SEVEN years ago! Why? Because they could afford to and they knew no other team could. And they were right. It's seven years later, and no one's signed as rich a contract. But the baseball know-it-all's now are saying that because Pujols is the best player in baseball—and they're not wrong about that—that he deserves to be the highest paid. And they wouldn't be wrong about that either, had the Yankees not raised the ceiling on that to heavenly proportions. Funny, too, because they're as close to the devil as a baseball team can be. Ahh, but that's another story.

So here I go: I would like to think that if the name on the back of my jersey read "PUJOLS" I would stay a St. Louis Cardinal, take a raise—knowing it falls short of A-Rod territory, because even A-Rod shouldn't be making A-Rod money, and neither should I—and be happy. Ecstatic, even. Ecstatic because I set an example of playing with pride. Of playing with the same team for my whole career and not following the money to some team out east that can afford to pay me better than A-Rod money. And, I would like to think, not ruin it even further for baseball when the next supreme talent, ten, twenty, fifty years from now is due for a raise, by pushing that ceiling even higher still than it ever needed to be pushed in the first place.

I would like to think, anyway.