The Tigers" Confounding Royalty Payment to Prince Fielder - Leading Off Just about the same time Prince Fielder's gargantuan, nine-year, $214 million contract agreement with the Detroit Tigers set baseball jaws dropping on Tuesday - the wows stemming from how long the contract is, the eye-popping total and that it was the Detroit Tigers shelling it out - it got its whiff of irony by arriving on exactly the same day "Moneyball" was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. Yes, again baseball decided the glories of overspending are more attractive than team/movie scenarios that make penny-pinching and Scott Hatteberg a star. Tigers owner Mike Ilitch joined the "go big or go home" trend in a dramatic way, but as Bob Wojnowski writes in The Detroit News, none of this should surprised us anymore. It is easy to argue this is just pure insanity, particularly because as Tim Brown points out on Yahoo.com, the usual money machines in New York and Boston weren't even driving up the bidding this year. So Ken Rosenthal of Foxsports.com is among those flabbergasted by the irrationality of it. But this was all about Ilitch wanting a World Series ring, so he went big: big player, bigger contract, gigantic risk, writes Mitch Albom in The Detroit Free Press. It came only days after General Manager Dave Dombrowski had declared Fielder a poor fit for the team, but he apparently found a very large shoehorn in short order, writes Danny Knobler on CBSSports.com, to make room for the one-two punch of Fielder and Miguel Cabrera. The payday seemed to bail agent Scott Boras out of a jam, writes Jerry Crasnick on ESPN.com, because jackpot time seemed to be slipping away. The deal brings Fielder back to the city where his dad Cecil became a star, which means a new spotlight will shine on their estrangement. Cecil Fielder did say in a radio interview on Tuesday that the two are working on repairing their relationship, but it is likely to create many uncomfortable moments along with the memories of a young Prince hitting batting practice homers with his dad at Tiger Stadium. And the sad thing about baseball's richest-take-all system is, spending usually works. The Tigers now have 8/1 odds of winning the World Series, according to Las Vegas bookmakers. "Moneyball" has only 30/1 odds of winning Best Picture. Beyond baseball's silly season news, it was hard not to feel a different kind of awe at the scene in State College, Pa., where thousands of people came to say their last goodbyes to Joe Paterno. It included his large family and larger family of ex-players, writes Ivan Maisel on ESPN.com, who turned the trip to Penn State into a sort of pilgrimage. SI.com's Joe Posnanski writes that Paterno did not spend his last days broken-hearted, as many suspect. He did die as the last of his coaching generation, although Tim Keown of ESPN.com writes that if we learned anything from Paterno's downfall, it's that the reality of that generation is nowhere near its mythical image. The major sporting event progressing in our pre-Super Bowl lull is tennis's Australian Open, where Andy Murray showed enough grit to reach the semifinals again, writes Ravi Ubha on ESPN.com. Bad news: he gets to play Novak Djokovic in the semifinals, frequently where Murray's Grand Slam dreams go to die. The other semifinal will pit old rivals Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, whose rivalry has a new twist after some pre-tournament sniping, writes Bruce Jenkins on SI.com. Petra Kvitova and Maria Sharapova advanced to the semifinals with victories early Wednesday, which has highlighted the new joy Sharapova seems to have for the sport, writes Richard Evans on Foxsports.com. Joy will not be lacking for Prince Fielder or for Detroit. No, the only question there is, was it worth the price?