Agent Scott Boras again looms large over the Royals’ future
SAM MELLINGER COMMENTARY
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NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. | The entrance looks like a bank vault, and that seems about right for this place. Nobody is here to greet you, just black double doors with silver handles and a callbox. You need the code or an appointment to get inside.
A revolutionary works here, or maybe an evil man.
Scott Boras has been called both.
Baseball is different because of what he and his staff have done inside the walls of this building a short drive from the Pacific Ocean. More than $4 billion in contracts, dozens of name-brand superstars switching teams, and a complete overhaul in how players enter the industry have all been negotiated and plotted here.
In some ways, Boras created baseball’s current system.
In other ways, the system created Boras.
Few places have felt his power more than Kansas City, where the Royals’ outlook has sunk and now started to rise along with their willingness to work with the Boras Corporation and its deep roster of stars.
He’s had more influence over the Royals’ last two decades than anyone who doesn’t work for the team, and more than perhaps everyone who does save owner David Glass.
That influence has rarely been as evident as it is now.
Eight days remain for the Royals to sign Bubba Starling, called “the perfect client” for Boras by one insider.
Starling is the No. 5 overall pick from Gardner Edgerton High School, a local folk hero whose athleticism and budding legend, combined with a football and baseball scholarship to Nebraska, place him squarely within Boras’ sweet spot of negotiating power.
The Royals will offer Starling the largest signing bonus in franchise history, likely one of the biggest in baseball history, but Boras may still advise Starling against taking it.
It will all be negotiated and plotted from inside this building by a 58-year-old man who grew up milking cows on his family’s farm and now holds so much of the Royals’ future in his advice.
Starling told The Star last week the process is “getting really stressful now.” The man giving him the advice is calm and confident.
“The currency in baseball is not just money,” Boras says. “It’s intellect.”
• • •
If that’s true, the real stash is in the basement here. Stacks of hard drives line the middle of the room, filling the ears with the buzzing sound of information, like the hum of an air conditioning unit.
This is the nerve center of the Boras Corporation, and it’s taken on a mythical status in baseball. Luke Hochevar, a Boras client, stood back in Kansas City and pictured a room twice as big as the Royals’ clubhouse.
It might actually be closer in size to a small bedroom, but this is the basis of everything they do here. The computers send automated updates on every Boras client to every Boras employee every 30 minutes. Boras’ people like to brag that the system is more advanced than the players union’s, and more detailed than what some teams have.
In-depth studies and comparisons are as simple as a Google search, with details as small as how beer and concessions sales are affected when his clients pitch. This is how Boras negotiates a total of $438 million for Alex Rodriguez.
“I’m an information guy,” Boras says.
This is his secret. It’s his weapon, his power, the vehicle he uses to alter the way baseball organizations conduct business. He has beaten down franchises and milked billionaires with the information stored here.
The Royals are different because of what’s in this room, because a failed minor-league baseball player quit defending drug companies in courtrooms to build this office and fight for athletes.
• • •
Boras’ strange life started three decades ago when he was a lawyer on his way toward making partner.
A few friends and former minor-league teammates asked for help with the business part of baseball. Boras agreed, and felt disrespected by the teams in the process. Soon he quit his job and made it his life’s work to even the power between baseball players and teams.
The more information he gathered, the more he felt the need. Signing bonuses rose only slightly over the first 20 years of the draft despite the sport’s revenue more than doubling. Everything is a math equation to Boras, and this didn’t seem right.
“We are no different than the balance of the game,” Boras says. “The money is merely an equation. It’s an equation. The values of players are simply relative to the values of the revenues produced by that.”
So he attacked the draft from all angles, finding a loophole that got Tim Belcher an extra $40,000 or so through the supplemental draft, and attempting to create another by putting Jason Varitek into an independent league and declaring he was no longer an amateur player subject to traditional draft rules.
In no small part through Boras’ stubborn negotiations, free-agent salaries and signing bonuses of top draft picks began to escalate in the 1980s. As they did, Boras became hated by many within the sport.
His negotiations often follow similar and brutal patterns. Enormous binders highlight free agents’ success and historical comparisons drive huge contract demands, with Boras often citing a competing bid from what’s become known as “the mystery team.”
Many baseball personnel men call him a liar and some characterize his stable of clients as a cult blindly following its leader. But they’ll never say such things publicly because they need the players he represents — Prince Fielder, Jered Weaver and Carlos Gonzalez among them.
Boras dismisses the notion that he’s somehow bad for the game. If he were, he says, baseball’s revenues would not continue to climb. Perhaps more than any other agent, Boras invests in his clients. Psychologists, strength coaches, nutritionists, financial planning … he says these things make his clients better, which makes baseball better, which in turn is good for everyone involved.
And if teams disagree, there are other players out there.
“Relationships in baseball are voluntary,” he says.
Three of the biggest five contracts in baseball history were negotiated by Boras and his team, and those aren’t even the most impressive.
J.D. Drew got millions more than the initial offer coming out of the draft, and, after most people thought he was nuts to opt out of $33 million left on a contract with the Dodgers, he got $70 million from the Red Sox. Boras once negotiated $65 million for Chan Ho Park.
Boras isn’t flawless. He argued Varitek was worth $10 million in 2009 and got half that. Rey Sanchez lost $5 million one season following Boras’ advice. There is also a prevailing feeling among many within baseball that Boras’ focus is so money-driven that it sucks the joy out of his clients’ lives, that they may end up richer but not as happy.
That’s the image many carry back in Kansas City, where Boras has come to represent what the Royals can’t do.
• • •
The Royals never officially banned the selection or signing of Boras clients, but only because they didn’t have to. It was more of a practical matter. They couldn’t afford them.
Since 1998, one of five Boras clients has been the highest-paid player in the National League in all but four seasons. In 2001, Boras negotiated the landmark $252 million deal for Alex Rodriguez, who then opted out for an even bigger contract seven years later.
Baseball America named Boras one of the sport’s 25 most powerful people for his impact on salaries, and the trend drove baseball’s best players past the Royals’ spending and on to bigger markets.
Baseball’s average salary was $1.2 million in 1994, when the Royals ranked fourth overall in spending. By 2000, while the Royals were being run by a board of directors told to cut spending, that average was up to $2 million.
That year, they ranked 28th in payroll.
The Royals have just one winning season in the last 16, and the plight is often told through the lens of the early 2000s, when Boras clients Carlos Beltran and Johnny Damon made it clear they would not re-sign unless the franchise made major changes.
Beltran went to Houston in a trade for John Buck, Mike Wood and Mark Teahen. He later signed for $119 million with the Mets. Damon went to Oakland for Angel Berroa, A.J. Hinch and Roberto Hernandez. He later signed for $31 million with Boston, then $52 million with the Yankees.
Beltran’s and Damon’s average salaries alone since leaving Kansas City are nearly 25 percent of the Royals’ average payrolls since 2000.
The Royals may have been the worst-run and most hopeless franchise in baseball when Dayton Moore became general manager in 2006. One of the first things Moore did after being hired was meet with Boras.
That year, the Royals used the only No. 1 overall pick in franchise history on Hochevar. He was the first Boras client the Royals had selected in the first round since 1998, and it cost them a $5.3 million contract. The next year they gave $4 million to Mike Moustakas, then $6 million for Eric Hosmer, $3 million for Aaron Crow, and $2.75 million for Christian Colon.
That’s five Royals first-round picks, including the largest contracts for draft picks in franchise history, and all but one of them are Boras clients.
“We’re very cognizant of the idea that this whole system falls apart if we don’t have the requisite success for each individual franchise when we do this,” Boras says. “The GM, when they pick these guys … is on the line. And so are we.”
There are other factors, but it’s no coincidence that over the same period the Royals went from one of baseball’s worst farm systems to what many call one of the best in recent history.
This is also true: the Royals have never had a negotiation that will be followed as closely or have the potential to change the franchise as much as the one they’re currently discussing with Boras’ perfect client.
• • •
Bubba Starling is a special case, and Boras built his empire with special cases.
Starling plays center field, a premier position. He is fast (4.36 seconds in the 40-yard dash), strong (Royals scouts tell stories about 500-foot home runs), can throw (95-mph fastball) and best of all for his leverage, has a scholarship to play quarterback and baseball at Nebraska.
Recent Boras draft picks Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper provided obvious negotiating power with unmistakable talent.
Starling provides a different kind of leverage, one that’s right in Boras’ wheelhouse. Boras is putting together charts and studies about Starling’s NFL potential and will argue that any baseball contract needs to account for his giving up on the other sport.
The Royals in June made Starling the first position player and first high school prospect selected. A staple of any Boras-driven negotiation includes the value of a college education and his claim that when he advises against signing out of high school, the player’s bonus out of college is an average of three times larger.
As an example, Boras might point out that Hosmer signed for $6 million out of high school three years ago; had he passed and gone into this summer’s draft, he’d be in line for around twice that.
Remember, it’s all math to Boras. Joe Mauer signed with the Twins for $5.1 million in 2001, for instance, but baseball’s revenues have since doubled so the same talent should get more than $10 million now.
Maybe this all sounds crazy to you, that anybody who would turn down a lifetime of security before their career even starts is some combination of stupid and offensive. But, calculating a typical agent’s cut of 5 percent, Boras has made more than $200 million applying his math to baseball’s growing revenue.
“I’m very happy that we can afford our principles,” Boras says. “It’s our empirical information. The best thing I can do over the years is go back to each team and say, look, ‘We represent draft picks that aren’t worth this type of money and we don’t ask for it. The only time we ask for it is when they’re worth it.’”
This is mostly how he talks. Direct questions are answered indirectly, but with embedded messages that say this is a special talent with special negotiating power and it will take a proportionately special contract to sign him.
He will pressure the Royals by telling them that 85 percent of the players he advises who sign out of high school become productive and longtime major-league players.
“And the majority of them are stars,” Boras says.
• • •
Before the draft, baseball teams were told Boras would seek $12 million for Starling. In the time since, the rumored number has dropped closer to $10 million.
Negotiations haven’t begun in any real way, and probably won’t until shortly before the deadline a week from Monday. It’s a high-stakes game of chicken, with the futures of a talented 18-year-old and a Major League Baseball franchise resting in the outcome.
There are holes in Boras’ case, of course. The Royals will be offering the biggest bonus in franchise history. Eight million dollars is reasonable, maybe more. That’s enough to blow the formula expecting a three-fold increase after college, and Boras himself allows that when teams are offering this kind of money, the deals typically get done.
Plus, if Starling failed in pro baseball he wouldn’t be the first to go back to college and try for the NFL.
Outside of Boras Corp. and the Royals, most observers expect a contract to be signed. There is too much money at stake, and neither the Royals nor Starling want to be part of a failed deal between hometown franchise and kid.
But there is just enough in Boras’ history and confidence to make everyone unsure. His advice has rocked and shocked baseball before. Leading up to the draft, Starling called being selected by the Royals a “dream.” But he’s also openly wondered whether he’s ready for professional baseball.
He talks up the draw of playing two sports at Nebraska, and is now in Lincoln lifting weights with the football team. Although he wasn’t on Nebraska’s 105-man roster when it opened practice Saturday, the Huskers have assigned Starling jersey No. 16.
This is the biggest worry about a deal being done with the Royals, that they never should’ve let him get on campus.
“We’re big believers in the value of a college education,” Boras says.
There is a slight smile on his face now. Boras is advising an elite talent with special options against a needy team. Hard drives full of information will guide him.
The perfect client is putting Boras in the perfect position.
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