How Hard is Your Sports Agent Working?
Everyone has an opinion about baseball sports agent Scott Boras. People either love him or hate him.
One thing that Boras does well is drive up the price for his players. This benefits all major league baseball players, and their agents, because he makes more money available. Owners’ complaints about Boras are well-documented: He is a hold-up artist who artificially inflates salaries to the point where baseball is on the verge of a permanent disparity between the large- and small-market teams.
We will cover the disparity in another blog post. What has impressed me about Boras’ recent comments is that he called out the St. Louis Cardinals for crying poverty:
In an interview that ran about 15 minutes, Boras chided the Cardinals for portraying themselves as a "middle-market franchise" and served up a reminder of a potential power-shifting decision the Red Sox made last winter.
Boras always presents unrealistic demands in the initial stages before contract negotiations get serious. He also obtains results, as witnessed most recently by the eight-year, $180 million contract that his client Mark Teixeira signed with the Yankees last offseason.
Boras also disputed MLB's complaints that the current economic crisis will depress the market for free agents:
"We hear this every year," Boras said of MLB's forecasts that spending will be down. "Based upon their bad economic forecasts of last year, I won't invest in their stocks of choice."
