Go-To Guy
Agent Scott Boras is changing the business of baseball
When Boras travels, it's often to college or even high school games, scouting new prospects. His next trip will be to watch Jered Weaver, the undefeated ace of the Long Beach State Dirtbags pitching staff, a Boras advisee who will probably be this year's top draft pick.
When and if he does represent such players, Boras will employ his trademark strategy. "Three simple words: preparation, preparation, preparation," he says. "When you walk into a team, it's not that you have information--it's that you have incredible information." When he was shopping Rodriguez around in 2000, Boras and staff put together an 80 - page book that included the player's history and potential, as well as a prediction that he would become the best shortstop ever.
General managers say Boras's poker skills are his real asset. He always seems to conjure up a competing offer--or hints at one--that drives a player's price through the roof. That gambit cemented Bernie Williams's seven-year, $87.5 million offer from the Yankees in 1998, which Boras calls his toughest negotiation so far. "He was a 20-home-run center fielder, and we wanted 40-home-run money," he says. "It took a lot of information, a lot of data, to get him that. In the end, we got an offer from the Red Sox, and [Yankees owner George] Steinbrenner came around." Yankees GM Brian Cashman calls Boras a very tough negotiator but says the market ultimately sets the price: "Scott's a seller and we're the buyer. He's willing to take chances, and his clients are willing to take chances with him."
The deals that Boras makes have won him enmity from some fans. In Seattle, they still chafe over losing Rodriguez to Texas back in 2000. Anxiety that Boras will find star catcher Jason Varitek, now in the final year of his contract with the Red Sox, a better deal elsewhere is the talk of at least one fan Web site, where bloggers spell the agent's name "Bora$."Several owners and general managers, too, have disparaged Boras in the press for his hard-nosed tactics.
Thus the "most hated man" title, which makes the affable backslapper suddenly glower. "Who said that?" Boras demands. "GMs never say these things to my face. If I am responsible for growing salaries, I must also bear a large responsibility for the growing revenues of the sport."
League revenues have been growing at roughly 10 percent a year since 1995, estimates Smith College professor and expert on baseball economics Andrew Zimbalist, and the vast majority of teams appear to be profitable. That's despite the fact that owners continue to cry poor and look for new ways to hold down salaries, just as they've done since Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the 1922 Supreme Court decision approving baseball's monopoly status.
The other knock on Boras is that he focuses too narrowly on money, ignoring other factors that contribute to players' happiness and fulfillment, like being with a winning team or living near family. Bill Madden, a New York Daily News baseball columnist and vocal Boras critic, points to defensively gifted first baseman Travis Lee, a Boras client who played 145 games last year for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and now sits the bench for the Yankees, though for four times the money. "Lee should be a starter for somebody, but Boras screwed around with him all winter, and now he's a backup player."
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