You could fill volumes with what money can’t buy. How many of us played ball as kids in the backyard pretending to be the star player for the hometown team? No amount of money will bring back that moment, but Joe Mauer gets paid to live it. Even all the money Mauer just banked from the Minnesota Twins matters little because Mauer can’t buy the world. See, when you are Joe Mauer, you don’t need to buy it; rather the world gives itself to you.

It even transcends our little world.  Look at the complete harmonic convergence that is Mauer’s life. The man gets a franchise-record $184 million contract from one of the historically most miserly organizations in baseball largely because they had no way to say “No.” How do you refuse the 26-year old reigning American League MVP heading into the last year of a contract with his hometown team that happens to be opening a new stadium in a few weeks? Had the Twins not signed Mauer to a contract extension, every wheel of karma issue suddenly turns against Minnesota.

Not resigning Mauer would have guaranteed a special kind of doom for the Twins; the kind reserved for those guys who got their faces melted at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Once the fans’ curiosity of the new park passes, their attendance disappears once the team’s ability to compete does the same. One needn’t look any farther than the AL Central for the proof.

Remember when the Mighty Whiteys spent all their dough on their new ballpark in the early 90’s? Granted, the White Sox won a division title in 1993, but look at what happened to their attendance once they started parting out the team, like the time they sent the majority of their pitching staff to the Giants at the trade deadline despite the fact the Whiteys were only 3 ½ games back. No team can move into a new ballpark and expect fans to show up if the product on the field is littered with the usual flotsam the Twins generally skim from the free-agent market.

It’s funny how a few short years can change the landscape. In 2002, the Twins were deemed to be non-competitive and were targets of contraction. Since then, they’ve won a string of division titles and now have a payroll hovering around $100 million per year.

Perhaps it is time for those in baseball still singing the shopworn “big market/small market” song to realize the trick is in the decisions, not the size of the bank book.