I think the day teams start showing loyalty to players is the day players should start showing loyalty to teams. It's a business on both sides. On the ownership side, I don't want my team rewarding players for past performance....that would likely just weaken the team's future performance (the Phillies did this with a lot of guys from the '93 team, killed them for years).
From the players perspective, the player, in this case Pujols, not only has his own financial reasons to take the money, but there's a lot of pressure from the Player's Union for each player to maximize their earnings for all future players' contracts.
And I root for laundry.
