Of all the crazy free-agent sagas in baseball history, where would we rank this one?
Of all the nutty, convoluted, out-of-the-wild-blue-yonder twists and turns in any free agent’s plot line, who could top this one?
Apparently, a wise man once told Cliff Lee that what goes around, comes around — because one very mixed up year later, he’s come right back around to the very same Phillies team that traded him, didn’t want him and broke his heart.
Wow. How’d THAT happen?
OK, suppose you had fallen asleep last December, had some major sleep-deprivation issues to make up for and then finally awakened this week to the news that Cliff Lee had just agreed to a five-year, $100-plus-million deal with the Phillies.
If you’d had no idea what had gone down in between, you’d have said, “Yeah, sure. Well, of course, he did.”
But now think about these past 52 weeks. It was one year ago that the Phillies’ brass arrived home from the winter meetings and concluded they couldn’t sign Lee, so they traded him — as far away as geographically possible, to the distant 206 area code.
And then, 362 days later, they arrived home from another winter meetings and turned right around and signed the same guy they couldn’t sign?
Huh? How’d that happen?
Full story: Cliff Lee pulls a stunner and decides to go back to the Philadelphia Phillies – ESPN