Money is great. It’s wonderful.

With money, you can buy any type of good or service without any questions asked. Food, cars, women, men, a lawyer, a judge, a politician, a ride out of the country with no questions asked – money can buy it all, and it’s wonderful to have.

But there is one problem with money. When I was little, I decided ahead of time that I never wanted to be wealthy because I learned that most of the time, money has one mammoth drawback – you have to earn it.

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Granted, there is the lottery, a lucky hand of poker, a life of crime or sports writing, but for 99 percent of people who want money, you have to earn it. So, as happened to a soon-to-be SIU student at Busch Stadium last week, when about $40,000 literally falls into your hands it seems logical to cling to it like a religious dogma.

Mark Crummley, a baseball fan that should either receive a medal for nobility or a slap upside the head for stupidity, held more than $40,000 (Sammy Sosa’s 500th went for 44,823) in his hand in Ken Griffey Jr.’s 500th home run and simply gave it away.

That’s a Lexus or a high-maintenance girlfriend. It’s about a year’s worth of SIU tuition in the year 2020, 40,000 McChickens or 2,000 lapdances.

For Crummley, who is transferring from Wabash Valley College, it would certainly cover the rest of his college education and could still buy a car at graduation.

It’s more money than he will likely make his first year out of school, and a large sum of money to just about anyone living in Wabash Valley.

But he gave the ball back anyway, saying it means more to him.

Crummley is a former baseball player and used to collect his own home runs, and therefore figured it belonged to Griffey.

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“I really didn’t even think about keeping it,” Crummley told me last Monday. “It was his moment and his ball, so I figured it belonged to him.”

Perhaps Crummley should have thought about keeping it.

Forty-thousand dollars is a huge amount of money to him. To Griffey, it’s only five innings salary, and the memorabilia Crummley collected was not worth more than a few thousand.

Griffey owes him big, and if that were me, I would have taken him to the bank.

Baseball is not a romantic sport anymore. It’s a battle between millionaires and billionaires to determine who takes home a bigger piece of a pie the size of Alaska. Fans are ignored over and over, and catching a ball is a great way for revenge or at least to make up for the ridiculous amount you paid to get into the ballpark.

That’s the way I would think of it should history have fallen into my hands.

But Crummley didn’t. Even after the fact, he thinks he made the right decision and said he received more important things than money – autographed bats and jerseys, an experience he would never forget and, above all, respect. He has the respect of Griffey and the Cincinnati Reds, something he cannot put a price on.

The cynical part of me laughs at that and calls him a sucker – and that’s precisely the reason Crummley provides a lesson for us all and what probably makes him a better person than me.

Respect gives you nothing, says myself and a world full of cynics trapped in the idiocy that is capitalism. But Crummley is infinitely richer than anyone thinking that way because he lives in a world where baseball is romantic and the purpose of life is not to take advantage of other people no matter how much money they have.

In his world, it does not matter what gas costs, how much money he has in the bank or who has more of what. None of it matters because baseball is on, something I have not felt for years but would love to have back.

And in the long run, because of his selfless act, he will be richer. When Crummley is old, gray and hairless, he will remember meeting Ken Griffey Jr. – not that he is short $40,000.