"Money always defined Gil Meche's baseball career. He came with a price tag from the very beginning, an $820,000 bonus from the Mariners as a first-round draft pick and he had a full appreciation for what money could buy when he made the big leagues at age 20.

He will tell you now that he was kind of a punk back then. A know-it-all. No offense, but he had a fast car and a 95-mph fastball and millions of dollars on the way.

The big payday came before the 2007 season, when the Royals signed him for a five-year $55 million contract that momentarily shook baseball. The Royals were notoriously cheap, so who were they to spend that kind of money? Meche had a career 4.65 ERA, so who was he to get it?

He literally wore that contract on his back every day — hey, he'd always been No. 55 — and when he beat the Red Sox on opening day in his first start for the Royals, the huge headline in the Star the next day said: "HE'S MONEY!"

Later, when Meche's body started to break down and he eventually had to become a reliever, the screaming mostly revolved around the Royals wasting money.

So, yes, money always defined Meche's baseball career — right until the moment he ended it Tuesday, retired at 32 and apparently comfortable with the astonishing decision to walk away from the $12.4 million owed to him in the last year of that contract.

Sure changes the conversation, huh? If he was a punk in the beginning, now he sounds like something else entirely.

"I'm not really fulfilling what I thought I needed to do when I signed this contract," he says. "The Royals have done enough for me.""