[新聞] Boras calls all the shots for his clients
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文章來源：http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3039348
Boras calls all the shots for his clients
By Matthew Cole
ESPN The Magazine
Updated: September 27, 2007
SCOTT BORAS wants you to know that it's not all about the money. For
baseball's most successful capitalist, money flows from performance. And
performance is the result of talent plus information. Boras supplies both:
His information aids his talent, and his talent performs. And because of
that, Boras is a very rich man. Five-percent-skim-of-$2-billion rich.
Prime-seats-in-Anaheim-Los-Angeles-San-Diego-San-Francisco-and-Oakland rich.
An-Orange-County-mountaintop-mansion-with-a-clear-view-of-the-Pacific rich.
Boras knows there are 252 million reasons you probably hate him already. He
knows nobody roots for a man who negotiates between millionaires and
billionaires. If you follow the conventional wisdom about him -- and he
figures you do -- you believe he1 s a greedy snake-oil salesman, the Darth
Vader of Baseball, the Ruination of the National Pastime.
He knows you blame him for your $65 ticket, your $20 parking fee and your $8
beer, but especially for spiriting your favorite player away from your
favorite team over a few million dollars and a no-trade clause.
In three decades as a baseball agent -- he still does only baseball -- the
54-year-old Boras has made your favorite player his player, a valued member
of the Scott Boras All-Stars. He rents his players out to individual clubs
for the most money the market will bear, but he wants you to know that he
does so with the intention of making sure each member of his club plays
longer and better than those who don't get with the program. The Tigers
genuflected before him and came away with Pudge Rodriguez, Magglio Ordonez
and Kenny Rogers -- and look who made it to the World Series last year. The
Red Sox? They have six Boras guys, including Jason Varitek and Daisuke
Matsuzaka, and the club is headed for its fourth postseason in five years.
The Yankees? Team Boras1 franchise player is their third baseman. For now.
See, from his perch high above the Pacific Ocean, Scott Boras isn't ruining
baseball. He's running it.
BEFORE HE drove a Range Rover or authored the richest contract in pro sports
history, Boras milked cows and drove a tractor on his father's dairy farm in
Elk Grove, Calif., in the flatlands south of Sacramento. He wasn't even the
best athlete in his family; that was older brother Jim Jr., who was all-state
in football. Scott grew up dreaming of baseball, which in the rural America
of the 1960s was still the beloved national sport. He was a second baseman,
just good enough to keep the Dream alive. He was small, slow and suspect in
the field. But he batted .288 in his four-year minor league career, not too
shabby for a kid who spent his off-seasons studying industrial pharmacology
at the University of the Pacific. Baseball wouldn't last forever, not for a
guy with bum knees and cement hands. Marketing new drugs and medical
treatments -- there was a future in that.
"Stay in school, Boras," he heard somebody growl during batting practice one
day in 1976. "You're not that good." The voice belonged to the chain-smoking
manager of the Lakeland Tigers. Boras, playing for the St. Petersburg
Cardinals, was chasing the Class-A Florida State League batting crown, but
the Tigers had an authentic star second baseman in Lou Whitaker. "You can't
take him, Boras. He's better than you." Boras knew the voice was right. He
was hard work, but Whitaker was talent. And talent always wins. Boras struck
out three times that day. He didn't win the batting crown. The Dream died. He
hung up his spikes and went to law school at Pacific, although he still
collected a salary from the Cubs during his first year, while recovering from
his third knee surgery.
Had a knack for negotiation, it turns out.
His friends and teammates already knew that, and they figured their buddy in
law school could help them sell their careers. First it was a Sacramento kid
named Mike Fischlin, then Keith Hernandez, a budding star for the Cardinals.
Boras was just helping out a few friends, including his old spring-training
roommate, Claude Crockett, who'd turned him on to James Brown and Luther
Vandross. After getting his law degree, in 1982, Boras hung out a shingle as
a medical lawyer representing new products. He also discovered that selling
ballplayers was just like selling a new drug: Armed with the right data, he
could set the price. He held his ground, sold hard and got his buddies paid.
Buckets and bags of money.
So he changed careers and made baseball his business. He focused on top
prospects heading into the amateur draft, and in 1984 he got pitcher Tim
Belcher $150,000 when few signing bonuses had reached six figures since the
draft's inception in 1965. He exploited a series of loopholes that eventually
drove bonuses into the millions of dollars, driving owners to distraction.
But money wasn't his only motive. This was also about baseball, about pure
love for the perfect Greg Maddux cut fastball or Bernie Williams gliding
catch. Boras needed everyone to see just how good his team was.
And he loved to find raw talent. That's how he happened to be in Monterrey,
Mexico, in the summer of 1992, for the World Junior Baseball Championships.
He was there to see a Brazilian pitching prospect, but instead he spotted the
kid. He looks like a German shepherd puppy, Boras thought. Hands and feet too
big for his body. The kid, of course, was a tall, lanky, 16-year-old
shortstop from Miami named Alex Rodriguez.
Boras says he knew Rodriguez would be a superstar the first time they spoke.
The agent told the kid he used to be a ballplayer too, but his Dream had
died, and now he represented ballplayers. All he wanted was a few minutes to
explain why Rodriguez should think about getting ready for his Dream.
Because he might need help with that. Young A-Rod wanted information: "What's
Ken Griffey Jr. like? What makes him such a great hitter?" He was voracious,
like Boras, and precocious. Usually prospects were shy, unable to comprehend
their futures. Not this kid. He trusted the information. Filed it away.
Consumed it. After four hours of talking in a Mexican hotel lobby, Boras had
to send the kid to bed. "Let's meet again," Rodriguez said.
If this kid was destined to break the big records, the ones that hold for
decades, he'd have to be strong, flexible, indefatigable. Boras could keep
him healthy, help him handle the Dream.
As a former player, Boras believed that owners didn't invest enough in their
talent, their product. Teams treated players like replaceable parts. They had
pitchers and shortstops do the same training, the same lifting and
stretching. It didn't make sense. The teams didn't start teaching players how
to stay healthy and fit until they were men, which shaved years off
performance. Not for this kid, Boras told himself.
A-Rod would serve as the template for a new, full-service division of the
organization Boras had been gradually building. It was like a franchise of
his own, helping him locate the talent, sign it and protect it. The men he
had first helped -- his old teammates and friends -- came to work for him.
(Today, the Boras Corporation employs 38 people in its two-story headquarters
in Newport Beach, Calif., and has 35 others stationed around the world. At
its core are guys like Fischlin, who scouts the minors; former major league
pitcher Bill Caudill and shortstop Kurt Stillwell, who scout high schools and
colleges and help Boras drive up those bonuses; and another ex-pitcher, Jeff
Musselman, who serves as head of operations.) Boras could send his guys far
and wide, trust them to track the talent when and where he couldn't and to
recruit players away from other agents. He sent them all over the country and
the world, from the Pacific Northwest to the Dominican Republic, New Jersey
to Japan.
He needed more and better information to stay a step ahead in an increasingly
crowded field, so in the late 1980s he created a new division and staffed it
with statisticians and economists. They helped him seduce the talent -- not
with money but with information, lots of it. Boras knows it doesn't sound
sexy, doesn't sound very baseball. But to the kid in that Mexican hotel
lobby, or to a veteran pitcher thinking about switching leagues, information
can be sexier than money. Boras' experts built him a database with every stat
since 1871 mixed with every game since 1956. He wanted visual box scores, a
way to recall every at-bat or pitch by each player on Team Boras. His geeks
gave it to him, on five servers with four terabytes of space. Nearly every
game from the last three years lives, digitally, on his humming computers in
the basement of his headquarters.
It's like a situation room at the Pentagon, with dozens of flat-screens
showing bits of data streaming across them. For kids who are living the
Dream, to see their achievements and future in this context is, well, sexy.
Take A-Rod. Boras claims that at age 32, Rodriguez has the body and
flexibility of a 25-year-old.
Imagine adding seven years to your career, Boras tells his new kids. Imagine
what history you can make with those years. Boras shows them the batting
cages and the private gym. This is an institute, not some spa. Each member of
Team Boras gets a dedicated program designed by Steve Odgers, the former
White Sox conditioning director and decathlete, who has a neck the width of
an oak tree, a guy with 13 years of training data etched in journals. Odgers
gets prospects when they're just out of high school and puts them through a
year-round program designed specifically for each player -- because a relief
pitcher is not the same as a second baseman. He even teaches them yoga. Show
me a team that can do all that.
Throughout the year, Boras dispatches Odgers and four other trainers around
the country to check in on A-Rod, Dice-K, Pudge and the rest. It's Odgers who
tells teams what program the players should follow. Boras knew he couldn't
call trainers himself -- they'd never listen to a moneyman, but one of their
own, that's a different story. And if a team's trainer squawks about outside
interference, Boras might pick up the phone and call the GM.
"This is about durability," he'll say. "This kid can play until he's 40." The
fans in the stands know only about the contracts -- Rodriguez to the Rangers
for 252 mil will do that -- but Boras wants you to know it goes beyond that.
When he agreed to represent Barry Bonds, in 2000, he got Bonds to agree to
meet with him six times a year, one-on-one, to talk about hitting. Boras
promised to get Bonds plenty of money, and in return he wanted one of the
greatest hitters ever to tell him everything he knows about his craft. He
wanted to learn what goes on in the mind of a man who could hit .350 and
crush the ball 450 feet. Maybe he juiced, maybe he didn't -- doesn't change
what he knows about pitchers and hitting. You might ask, Shouldn't a guy this
controlling, a guy with a degree in pharmacology, know all about what his
players are putting into their bodies? Boras professes boredom with this line
of questioning, waves it off with an obscenity. Then he notes that Bonds
always had his own training program (and, in fact, left Boras in 2004 for the
Beverly Hills Sports Council).
But when Bonds was at the peak of his powers, he'd come over to Boras' house
and share his hitting secrets. That's how Boras found out that to develop
better timing, Bonds sometimes swings off a tee or takes batting practice
with his right eye closed, in an effort to sharpen his left eye and give
himself an extra millisecond to see a pitch.
Sure, Boras would use that information to seduce some young hotshot in a
hotel lobby, but really he was doing it for himself. He goes to a ballpark
nearly every day, sometimes twice a day. He'll watch an Angels afternoon game
in Anaheim and be at Dodger Stadium that night. He'll catch parts of another
12 games on TV, texting back and forth with his players, his teammates.
That's the part most people never seem to mention -- how much of a fan he is.
In between, he'll slip out to another ballpark to see his kids, his actual
kids. Boras and his wife, Jeanette, have two teenage sons who play. The older
one, Shane, is a high school second baseman, built like his dad was at that
age, slight and undersized. And this Boras can hit, too. Dad knows. He sees
all the games. There he is, video camera in hand, filming each of Shane's
at-bats, not for training purposes (the kid has high school coaches for that)
or for scouting purposes (Boras knows these guys aren't that good) but for
the sheer love of it. He goes to watch his sons play just like his dad
watched him. He sees Shane fly open and overswing, a strikeout. But by his
third at-bat -- last licks with two on, two out, down by two -- Shane cracks
a two-run single. Scott Boras stands with all the other Catholic League
parents, cheering for the clutch hit. "That1 s a pretty special day for a
dad," he says.
IT'S NOT just about the money, because Boras already has more than he'll ever
need. Money is just the way to keep score, the only real way to measure his
victories. He wants to test his team, to prove his franchise is worth the 30
years he has put into it. He wants the game to come to him. And with 140
players on his roster, and the ability to place them pretty much where he
sees fit, that's no stretch.
So one day he picks up the phone and hears that raspy voice, the one that
back in 1976 said, "You're not that good, Boras." The voice is older now,
there's even more gravel in it, enough to drive a tractor over. It's the
voice that has commanded top-notch clubs in Pittsburgh and Florida and now
Detroit. Jim Leyland took care of Boras' kids in Miami, in 1997, and Team
Boras helped deliver a ring. He hears Leyland on the line and remembers Kevin
Brown, Alex Fernandez, Charles Johnson and Robb Nen. Leyland called just
before taking the Tigers job in October 2005. "I need an arm. Who fits?" he
asked. "Kenny Rogers," Boras told him. Shortly after Leyland was hired,
Rogers was signed. From 119 losses to the World Series they went, with three
Boras players (Rogers, Pudge and Ordóñez) doing the heavy lifting.
Now Leyland needs help again, and that1 s why he's calling. "My pitching
stinks," he says. "We need more arms." Boras doesn't reply right away. He has
learned how to listen and, if asked, to parcel out information. Eventually he
reminds Leyland that the Tigers have a couple of flamethrowers smoldering in
their farm system. The kids aren't on Team Boras, but they're out there.
Boras can call up their scouting reports anytime he wants. He's got the
information. And information is power.
Leyland refuses to talk about Boras; through a Tigers PR rep, he denies
having any relationship with him. In the quiet of the clubhouse, though,
Leyland's players will tell you he does. "They talk all the time," Pudge
says. And why not? What team has the most talent, and what team has the most
information?
Team Boras. October rosters are dotted with his guys. A-Rod is poised to opt
out of his contract for an even bigger one; it'll be the story of the year.
Don't even ask about the minor leaguers, names you'll know in a few years.
One just signed for a record amount, a kid pitcher named Rick Porcello,
barely past his prom, who got a $7.28 million bonus from the Tigers. Where
are my arms?
Boras wants you to know it's not all about the money. He grew up on a farm
and left so he could reach for the Dream. He played for next to nothing and
paid with his knees. But he had to earn a living. He knows you may never
believe that even if he had stayed a medical lawyer, he'd still be at the
ballpark as often as humanly possible. He knows you may never believe how
much he loves the game you think he's ruining. But he believes it.
And he's the one keeping score.
--
Drive to my World:
http://www.wretch.cc/album/album.php?id=rodvader&book=19
--
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