News - Back up the truck

Ted Turner and Dale Murphy were inducted into the Braves Hall of Fame on Monday. On Tuesday, Chipper Jones became the position player with the highest average salary in the history of the game. For now, anyway. All because Turner managed the Braves for one game in Pittsburgh. He discovered that, "If you don't have 'em in the dugout, you can't put 'em on the field."

Words to live by.

Turner didn't always feel this way. "Murph," he said to Dale Murphy when the Braves were at their lowest, "don't worry about this slump. You're saving me thousands of dollars."

Now, Turner's team roster includes a couple of players who make more in a year than the $10 million he paid for the team in 1976.

After Ken Griffey, Jr. was traded to Cincinnati — his home-town team — before the season began, Jones said of Griffey's willingness to take less money to play for the team he grew up with, "What the hell's he thinking?" Then he reconsidered: "He's already had a big contract."

With Chipper's last contract, he was coming off a horrendous injury. He was more concerned about the length. This time, it was about the money.

"I'm not concerned with being the highest paid player," Jones said in spring training. "But I want to get, for once in my career, market value. And if for six months in my life I'm the highest paid player in the game."

Don't look now, but $15 million a year will not make him the highest paid player: Kevin Brown, the Dodgers pitcher, is already getting that.

Jones didn't know until just recently what, if anything, was going on with GM John Schuerholz, partly by design. "My agent" — Steve Hammond out of Orlando, the most low-key of the agents he interviewed — "might not tell me if they made an absurd offer so it wouldn't piss me off," Jones said early in the process. "Or he might [tell me] so I get pissed off enough to decide to become a free agent. That's more money for both of us."

Two months ago — also in Pittsburgh, coincidentally — Bobby Bonilla was making beeping sounds in the visitors' clubhouse at Three Rivers Stadium. "The truck's backin' up!" he chortled, needling Chipper Jones.

Tuesday, the truck arrived, to the tune of six years and $90 million, plus club options that can push the total even higher. Theoretically.

Don't get all emotional about Jones being a Brave for the rest of his career, though. You thought that about Dale Murphy, too, remember? And David Justice?

I was in my first season covering the Braves when Justice taught me the most valuable lesson I've learned in pro sports: "Just remember," he told me, "they traded Dale Murphy."