Adam LaRoche addresses retirement, has no regrets about decision
Adam LaRoche’s sudden retirement from the Chicago White Sox dominated headlines during spring training.
The story was more than a veteran ballplayer retiring. That happens all the time. The circumstances with this particular situation were peculiar: LaRoche stepped away from the game, and $13 million, because the White Sox organization had told him his 14-year-old son Drake could no longer accompany him in the clubhouse every day.
We’re now over a week into the regular season, the White Sox are off to a 5-2 start, and LaRoche doesn’t regret his decision one bit.
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In a lengthy profile by ESPN The Magazine’s Tim Keown, LaRoche expounds on his reasons for retiring:
“I never took it for granted,” he says. “One, I get to play a game. Two, I get paid an absurd amount of money to play a game. Three, I can have my son with me while I’m doing it. I was pinching myself all the time, wondering, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ And I always knew it could get shut down at any point. You could have a manager who just flat doesn’t like it. You can have players complain — Hey, we’re tired of having a kid around. There’s a chance we could have other guys see Drake and think, ‘I’ll bring my kid too.’ Obviously we can’t turn this into a day care. I get it.”
Here’s another part you need to get: The more he became immersed in the game, the less of a hold it had on him. “A lot of times I’ve wanted to say, ‘Honestly, baseball is not that important to me,'” he says. “And I could never figure out a way that didn’t sound like I took it for granted or didn’t want to be there. But if I had blown out a couple of years ago, or got released, I think I would have gotten over it really quick. I love it. It’s a passion. But I think every one of us is put here for a bigger purpose.”
It was already well known LaRoche has plenty of interests outside of baseball – he hunts and fishes, owns a ranch and stars in a reality TV show – but a 10-day trip to Southeast Asia in November with his good friend, Milwaukee Brewers reliever Blaine Boyer, where they went undercover in brothels to identify and rescue underage sex slaves, altered LaRoche’s perspective even more:
When it came time to board a flight back home, LaRoche hesitated. “I was sick,” he says. “I was thinking about my kids and then thinking about the hundreds of thousands of parents who are searching for their 12-year-old daughters.”
As they waited for their plane, LaRoche asked Boyer, “What are we doing? We’re going back to play a game for the next eight months?”
[Elsewhere: Dee Gordon’s epic 16-pitch at-bat leads to Miami’s winning run]
It’s a fascinating insight into a man who became a symbol for a broader discussion and Keown’s conversation with LaRoche is worth your time given how much coverage the original story received.
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Israel Fehr is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter. Follow @israelfehr
