It looks like Barry Larkin is about to retire. Larkin's doing a number of non-baseball activities this winter:

None of those pursuits, you might notice, have anything to do with playing shortstop in the major leagues.

Does this mean Larkin's playing career is officially over? He won't say those words directly, but it doesn't take much reading between the lines to determine the answer to that question.

"I'm doing what I want to do," Larkin said over the telephone from Florida. "I have a lot of oars in the water and there's a lot of things that I'm doing. One thing I'm not doing is sitting around at home worrying about baseball -- or about anything, for that matter."

Larkin has not had a great season this decade. Although it appears that some teams would like to employee him, he's not comfortable playing anywhere but Cincinnati:

But Larkin still expressed a desire to play shortstop every day for someone and vowed to explore his options. As it turned out, most of the discussions he had about playing somewhere other than his hometown were internal.

"I really didn't know where I was on that," he said. "I didn't press the issue, and I kind of waited to see if it would go one way or the other. I never woke up and said OK, I can do it, I can go play for another team and feel good about it, representing another organization.

"I'm a very loyal person, and I just can't accept a salary from a team and not be able to go out there and give 100 percent. I just can't play that way. I can't do it, I won't do it, I haven't done it and I don't see myself doing it."

Larkin is one of a handful of recent retirees who will have spent his career with just one club (Gwynn, Puckett, Ripken, Yount, Brett, etc). It's loyalty that you don't see much from players or management anymore. With any luck, Barry will get a job with the organization. Of course, this doesn't help:

If Larkin sounds relaxed, it's because he is. He takes a tongue-in-cheek poke at the "youth movement that I was told was going to happen" evolving into the Reds signing thirtysomething veterans like Joe Randa, Rich Aurilia, Kent Mercker and David Weathers this offseason. Then again, Larkin turns 41 this April, which would make nearly everyone around him in any baseball clubhouse a relative youngster.

I have to agree with Barry on that one.

Durability likely cost Barry Larkin a place in the Hall of Fame. In 19 seasons, he only played 150 games four times. Injuries cost him around 700 games; since he averaged better than a hit a game during his career, it's likely he would have had 3000 hits playing 150 games a season. He was good at getting on base, showed power for a shortstop (before the power boom of the 1990's) and knew how to steal a base. He stole 379 bases in 456, good for an astronomical 83.1% success rate. If the counters were higher, he'd be going to Cooperstown.