Boras -- too clever by half

A great profile of super-agent Scott Boras in the New Yorker. The story underscores the fact that A-Rod needs Boras' counseling for his self-confidence (Barry Bonds and Gary Sheffield, two guys who don't lack self-assurance, dumped Boras as their agent, respectively, acrimoniously). But it also features this gem, which illustrates Boras' short-term perspective that can cost his clients millions later on.

Until this year, baseball’s draft was merely a very long conference call, by the end of which more than one in every hundred eligible amateur players in the country had been selected—deceived into thinking that stardom was soon to follow. (The draft lasts fifty rounds, compared with seven in the N.F.L. and two in the N.B.A.) It was instituted in 1965, and remained largely unaffected by the steady advances of the Players Association over the next two decades. (Union membership is restricted to major-league players, who have consistently made concessions on the amateur end in exchange for increased freedom for veterans.) Boras first got involved in 1983, while still moonlighting as a baseball counsellor in the employ of Rooks, Pitts & Poust. That summer, he approached a tall pitcher named Tim Belcher, who had just finished his junior year at Mount Vernon Nazarene College, in Ohio, and had been selected No. 1 over all by the Minnesota Twins. College juniors were seen as highly exploitable, because of the quirks of N.C.A.A. eligibility rules. They had no bargaining leverage. The Twins initially offered Belcher eighty thousand dollars to sign, which was twenty thousand dollars less than Rick Monday had received in 1965, as the first pick in the first draft.

Boras noticed that Mount Vernon Nazarene was not in fact a member of the N.C.A.A., and belonged instead to a much smaller organization, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, whose rules on eligibility were slightly different. He advised Belcher to plan to return to Ohio.

“The scouting director for the Twins was a very abrupt man,” Boras recalled in his office, referring to George Brophy, who died a few years ago. “He went public, saying, ‘It’s disgusting that these kids are being represented. They’re draft picks.’ All these antiquated thought processes. I kept on saying, ‘He’s a young man in a negotiation against a system, which requires him to sign a professional sports contract, which is governed by a collective-bargaining agreement. Why wouldn’t he need a lawyer?’ I said, ‘Why do your teams have lawyers who draft all these things up? You’ve unilaterally imposed all these rules.’ He sat there, looked at me, and goes, ‘I’m not a lawyer. I’m just talking to you about baseball. That’s not how we do things.’ I said, ‘Well, we’re changing. We’re changing for the betterment of the game. The great athletes aren’t going to come to baseball if you keep the bonuses at this level, because some owner will pay for that talent. It just happens to be in a different sport. Baseball players play football and basketball, too.’ ”

Boras contends that higher signing bonuses in those sports, where the college game is itself nearly professional, and where there is no illusion that prospective draftees are anything other than commodities, are partly to blame for the decline in African-American baseball players. (Blacks now account for only eight per cent of major leaguers, down from more than twenty-five per cent when Boras was still playing.) Belcher, however, was strictly a baseball player, and white. Brophy initially alleged that he had sacrificed his amateur status by hiring an agent; Boras countered that he was merely a legal adviser, and had signed no formal agreement. Belcher held out, returned to school, and reëntered the supplemental draft the next January, where he was taken by the Yankees. They paid him a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.

Think about that. Belcher sat out a year and got the extra 40 grand (from the Yankees, of course). But in return for that $40K, he likely became a free agent one year later than he may have had he taken the Twins' offer. By the late 80s, early 90s, when Belcher would have been eligible, that probably meant he lost a year in which he would have made ten, if not 100 times more than that extra signing money.

He took a similar tack with Boston's Jason Varitek and JD Drew.