These last few weeks have been strange for baseball. It’s the middle of the season and yet three of the better players in the game have just announced that they are retiring. I give Prince Fielder a pass because he didn’t actually want to retire. He was kind of forced to because of an injury. However, seeing guys like Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira announce their retirement over the last two weeks has me baffled. I understand their reasoning behind it, but I don’t understand why they would announce it now. Why not wait until the end of the season? There’s only one month left to play.

However, when you start to think about it, over the last few years some of the more well-known athletes have been letting people know way ahead of time that they were calling it quits. I’m going to exclude Alex Rodriguez because he gave a week's notice and quit in the middle of the season. But the others have given basically a whole year’s notice -- why? Whatever happened to waiting to the end of the season and saying, “That’s it, I’m done.” When did that go out of style?

When I first saw it happen with Mariano Rivera back in 2013, I thought "Okay, that’s cool. I’m glad he’s giving us, the fans, a whole year to try and cope with losing such a great player rather than dropping a bomb on us at the end of the season." I turned my television on every game because I wanted to make sure I cherished that final season. I wanted to see all of the celebrations and events that other teams had put together to celebrate his career. I thought it was pretty cool. Then Derek Jeter did the same thing, then Kobe Bryant, then David Ortiz and now this.

It has gotten to the point where I am sick of these retirement tours. Everybody is being so nice to the great players that have beaten your teams over the years. That’s not what sports are about. Where are the bitter rivalries? The Red Sox shouldn’t be celebrating Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. They should be booing them like they did A-Rod. It’s not the classy thing to do, but who cares? You’re not supposed to like each other. It’s called a rivalry for a reason. Do you think the Russians congratulated us when we beat them to the moon?

I can’t take the retirement tours anymore. I don’t want to see players be given special treatment and have a big last game knowing that they are out the door right after. It almost makes the great performance feel fake. As much as I’m sure the other teams didn’t intentionally let Kobe score all those points or have Derek Jeter end his career with a walk off single, it will be brought up by someone at some point.

There’s nothing wrong with just retiring at the end of the season like the players of old. In my opinion, you tell the owner so they can start preparing the team, but that’s it. The fans shouldn’t know until the season is over. The people might not appreciate it, but the whole retirement tour is starting to get watered down.