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1. Home Run Teal & Black Black Black Gone! Posted: December 04, 2009 at 10:30 PM (#3403705)I guess that explains the Andruw Jones contract.
I wouldn't negotiate like he does, and I wouldn't want him representing me, even if it got me 10-20% more $.
Scott Boras, middleman extraordinare, is, indeed, the embodiment of the American Dream.
I yell too much and for that I'm deeply sorry.
I admire people like Scott Boras and Michael Crabtree; sure they're selfish, but it's a lot easier to understand where they are coming from than it is to relate to the (already) billionaire owners who profit off an anti-trust exemption and drive down wages for the young non-billionaire players.
I'm not sure why so many people want to take ownership's side in these things.
Oh, they're scum too. Normally we tend to side with players, Boras just pushes it more to even loathing.
We'll need a new Commissioner soon.
He might murder puppies in his spare time, and that would make him a bad guy. But being excellent at his chosen career does not.
1) Boras is a douche.
2) If I were an MLB quality player, I'd probably want him as my agent.
I really don't have a clue as to what the Canadian Dream is, so it's not actually a question I can answer - it's not something I've ever really thought about.
He adds no value, since he doesn't grow the pot of money baseball generates. He -- arguably(**) -- moves a few dollars the owners would otherwise keep into the players' pockets. No value added. Value recipients rearranged.
(**) We don't even know that. A dollar he put into the pocket of Chan Ho Park or Darren Driefort or Luke Hochevar may have been offset by (i) dollars his other players didn't get because of his antics or because owners don't want to do business with him; or (ii) dollars that didn't go into the pockets of players represented by other agents. He also may detract value because a manager plays a Chan Ho Park or a Darren Dreifort more than he should, simply because the player's overpaid, lessening the quality of baseball and the fan support of the team employing its resources inefficiently.
To be less of an afterthought in Risk?
He works. It's just that his work, like that of Sisyphus or the common tapeworm, adds no value.
That's not a bad one. To have Americans stop asking us to "Say 'about'" would be another.
Okay, now say "Sorry, can I borrow some pasta tomorrow?"
I agree with SBB on this one. At best he rearranges value.
He's not even a true middleman. A real middleman does produce value, he moves good or services from the producer to the consumer. We're all really glad there are supermarkets so we don't have to seek out farmers and slaughterhouses to buy our food from. Supermarkets are middlemen, and valuable ones.
Even the much maligned investment banks do create value, even though there is a great deal of corruption that allows the bankers (but not the firms themselves) to keep more than their fair share of the value created. It would be very hard for investors with capital to find appropriate investments without some sort of banking industry; they add a lot of efficiency.
Contrary to this, agents add no value. They don't bring any incremental information to the process; they often try to obfuscate with misleading stats. They don't really facilitate the efficient distribution of baseball talent. All they provide is a negotiating service to their clients which, hopefully, transfers some value from the owners to the players.
Doesn't this apply to a LOT of jobs that people deem "middlemen", though. Say, NYC apartment brokers?
Yes. At one point they had a value-added role in learning about all the available appartments, but with the internet, a multiple listing service can provide 90% of the value. The only think the brokers add is showing the apartment, so the owners don't have to be there constantly.
I think it's important, though, to distinguish. "Middleman" shouldn't be an insult, real middlemen are important. They're a very different beast from "brokers" who just exploit a market inefficiency, or a legal or regulatory monopoly.
I appartment brokers actually rented the apartment from the owners and then re-marketed them, earning the spread on rents, and taking the risk of vacancy or getting a lower rent, then they'd be real middlemen, and far less loathsome.
Doesn't this apply to a LOT of jobs that people deem "middlemen", though. Say, NYC apartment brokers?
Too bad that the players can't figure out a way just to put their contracts up for bid on ebay. For about a hundred bucks they could probably hire some unemployed Sabermetrician to write up the best possible case for him in his "item description" and chuck the parasites off their backs.
Of course with ebay fees these days, a player might not save much money, but I have a hunch the Players' union could talk ebay down quite a bit on a package deal, if for nothing else but the publicity.
Baseball adds no value, it just rearranges money that the public would anyway have spent.
The only question that is interesting for Boras clients is if he provides value for money for them.
100% incorrect.
Entertainment creates value. Would you be equally happy if you spent the time and money you spend following baseball following soccer or opera? I sure as hell wouldn't.
You could say that about any product. "Beef ranchers add no value b/c people would just spend the money on chicken if they didn't exist." No, people have that option now, to not consume beef or baseball, the fact that they do shows it creates value.
Of course with ebay fees these days, a player might not save much money, but I have a hunch the Players' union could talk ebay down quite a bit on a package deal, if for nothing else but the publicity.
Some sort of silent auction system would be awesome. Rank the players somehow, and have them auctioned from best to worst, one a day, as long as it takes. The teams submit their bids from 8 AM to 6PM, and at 6 PM the player gets to see them all, and picks the winner.
That's some kick ass programming for 8 PM every night for the MLB network.
I can't see how one is more or less valuable than the other. They each try to capture as much of the total "economic pie" as possible for their employers.
He negotiates. Negotiations aren't about the most efficient allocation of resources, its about getting more for yourself. Boras adds value by getting more $ for his clients. Is that really so hard to see?
That's what I said. He reallocates value, hopefully, to his clients, he doesn't increase the total amount of "value" created.
A real middleman does increase the total amount of value. A steak sitting in the grocery case 3 miles from my house has way more actual value than a steak sitting in a slaughterhouse in KC.
Entertainment creates value. Would you be equally happy is you spent the time and money you spend following baseball following soccer or opera? I sure as hell wouldn't.
Sure. :-)
And that's why agents provides value, they negotiate contracts and handle business matters so the players can spend time getting entertained in strip clubs instead of sitting in contract law classes.
True.
Of course you could just hire lawyers and accountants to do that and not give them a role in negotiating your contract or give them a % of your earnings.
By increasing player salaries, Scott Boras helps attract better athletes to the game of baseball, thereby improving its entertainment value.
At least I think that's the argument here.
Would you feel differently if baseball teams were owned by small shareholders, like the Green Bay Packers - but on a for profit model?
Every team should give a small stake to an orphan home or something for PR purposes:
"Boras's greed means there will now only be one hot meal per day in the shelter"
If you think baseball is expensive, you should try the opera.
The only economic agent who can add value to a factory steak, after the steel slug hits the steer in the brain, is a chef.
Your better super-market or other butcher shops still do the cutting from larger pieces of meat.
But that's minor compared to the steak sitting waiting for me, 24/7, along with all sorts of other fresh foods and preserved foods at the same place. If you'd like to eat said steak today, with potato, salad, vegetable, bread and dessert, that's a pretty huge advantage. Also, it's generally not ludicrously overpriced, and not particularly tasty like Omaha Steaks. ( If you like to order steaks, try Horizon Foods, much better meat.)
It would be quite annoying to have to order 30 different types of food from 30 different providers and coordinate storage and delivery to ensure you always have what you want/need. Being able to stop on your way home from work and pick it all up in one place is a pretty big value add. Now a non-supermarket can provide this type of service, like Fresh Direct which consolidate and deliver, or you could have a separate butcher/baker/grocer/green-grocer like in the old days, but you still really need a middle man. I'm partial to the old fashioned separate outlets. b/c you get better quality.
At a higher cost, because you're paying for the individual packaging and shipping of your steaks (and the costs of ensuring that they are received and promptly refrigerated/frozen) - whereas supermarkets can benefit from economies of scale and pass (some of) that value on to consumers.
As for Boras, he single-handedly generates two articles a week during the offseason to spark discussion - seems valuable to me!
I always thought the Canadian Dream was just staying warm in the winter.
Wouldn't you prefer to know whether he's a black swan?
As for Boras being a liar, as some have charged: (1) that's based on post-hoc claims by team management about what other offers might or might not have been out there, and (2) how come nobody gets worked up about "lying" when a GM says to a free agent, "You know, you're not the only SP on the market. If you don't take this offer today, we've got another candidate lined up ready to accept it"?
Does that mean my accountant adds no value?
If he can do your taxes faster/more efficiently and better than you can, then he adds value. Avoiding mistakes adds value. Mistakes cost everyone, taxpayer and government money.
Saving time adds value. I could shovel my driveway, but paying a guy that has invested in a truck and plow is more efficient. Likewise, paying one guy to learn the tax code and do taxes for 300 people, is more efficient than 300 separate people spending the time to learn the tax code.
As the great Chicago economist George Stigler said, the gains from trade are largely due to specialization.
This is a little bit of a tricky example though, because filling out your taxes is not an optional activity. The whole tax preparation system add no value vs. a simpler tax code that did not require "preparation".
Overall, the tax system provides a huge amount of negative value to society. Hundreds of thousands of people (both government employees and private sector employees) are engaged in a giant zero sum game between the government and taxpayers to generate the current amount of revenue.
Your supermarket steak and 3/4 of the other products in that store are cheap because of huge government subsidies.
This is amazingly wrong. Scott Boras is the best agent because he has created more value for his clients than all other agents combined.
He's been tremendously creative in finding loopholes and new approaches to maximize the value of his clients. He's damn smart while other agents just following negotiation handbooks. That's a value creation mechanism right there. You can argue that it shifting the same money between owners and players, but I think both the owners and players regard Scott's efforts as creating value for themselves or the other side.
And just as an agent, he's the best negotiator. His clients consistently set and break draft bonus records even without finding loopholes.
Again, no one is saying he doesn't, on average, extract more value for his clients (although quite a few have ended up getting screwed b/c of his harsh stances/reputation I'm sure).
What we're saying is that doesn't create any incremental value. It's just reallocating producer and consumer surplus in the pricing of baseball playing services. If anything, his approach reduces efficiency b/c of the mistrust he causes in the process. At best he's neutral.
There's no way to argue he's "good for baseball". If he good for most of his clients which he seems to be) just say that.
The only way you could argue that an agent was "good for baseball" is if he was down in the sandlots of the Caribbean finding unknown talent. Boras aint doing that.
My suspicion however, based on his behavior, and my business and personal experience is that a person like him is 95% likely to be dirty. The guys that people claim "use every advantage within the rules" and "play the game hard but fair" almost always end up being crooks.
No one said he was. The argument is that he adds nothing to either the economic pie of (a) the baseball industry; or (b) society. A dollar extra to Luke Hochevar is simply redistributed out of the owner's pocket, and wouldn't disappear if it remained in the owner's pocket. Boras takes a percentage of the salary of talent. Talent he has nothing to do with.
(And when I say "a service," he's really providing multiple services; the fact that as outsiders we focus primarily on contract negotiations with teams doesn't mean that he isn't doing plenty of other stuff for his clients.)
The "plenty of other stuff" may add value. I'd need more specifics, beginning with ratio of skimmed 4% to fees from "other stuff," and what the "other stuff" is. It likely pales in comparison to the commission, skimming business but if anyone has anything to bring forward on the matter, this portion of the audience will be receptive. Speculative conclusions free of detail don't carry much weight. It takes an awful lot of billable hours to match the revenue you can skim from Kevin Brown's hard work and talent.
Even the parasitical part of his business may actually drain value for the reasons I stated upthread. Putting Chan Ho Park or Darren Dreifort on the mound because they're being paid a Borascammed salary, when they'd be watching from the dugout in the absence of economic considerations, renders the quality of the entertainment and competition offered to the public sub-optimal. If economic rationality holds, this lesser product shrinks the public's interest and the economic pie. There's every reason to believe, given the industry's continuing inability to accept the finality of sunk costs -- a phenomenon oft-commented upon by the baseball analyst community -- that this in fact happens. And if Boras isn't in a class of his own when it comes to generating sunk costs, it sure doesn't take long to call roll.
I agree with this David; he owes the owners no breaks.
My problem is that everybody I've ever known/observed who pushes the envelope like that, invariably is breaking through the envelope to do unethical/illegal things. For years people think they are just "pushing the envelope" until they get caught red-handed, and then it come out they've be breaking the rules for years and years.
We've seen it time and time again from Madoff, to Enron, to WorldComm, to the subprime mortgage mess. All the guys who are "real geniuses" and have "figure out a way to take maximium advantage within the rules" end up being crooks.
The "disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition ... is ... the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
--Karl Marx (**)
(**) Actually, Adam Smith.
No he doesn't and, assuming his law license is in good standing, owes his clients vigorous representation of their interests alone. We're distinguishing here between doing one's job well, even admirably, within its narrow confines, and the broader impact of that job.
100%
"Behind every great fortune there is a crime." is not strictly true, but is way too close for comfort.
I'm a rock-solid conservative, but anyone who doesn't admit the a large proportion of the rich and powerful got there by being crooks is wearing rose colored glasses.
Depends on whether you're using "crooks" in a narrow or a broad sense (i.e. dictionary or metaphorical), and it also depends on whether you mean "the" large proportion or "a" large proportion, since you just wrote both and forgot to erase one of them. 15% may be "a" large proportion, but it's not "the" large proportion.
And it also depends on whether you're also including honest heirs of dishonestly acquire fortunes, which---if you include land taken from Native Americans that got passed down among the "claimants" from generation to generation---might add a hell of a lot to your body count.
Then you've got people who use their political muscle and financial leverage to acquire even more power than they'd ever be able to get otherwise on a level playing field, but when all is said and done are mostly beneficial to society. But then you've got people who use technically legal means to achieve clearly immoral ends. And this doesn't even get into the zillions of borderline cases of defining what's "moral" or "immoral."
IOW that's a tough question to answer with sound bite answers one way or the other.
Yup, and to qualify, I'm talking about serious wealth and power - not some guy who's worth $10M b/c he started a small business or has farmland worth that much, or a town councilman.
I agree that I don't know the proportions but I wouldn't want to bet my life on picking out an honest man in a legislature or a boardroom.
Maybe you hang out with a bad crowd.
I doubt it. The same mindset that drives a man to find every loophole and exploitable feature of a contract drives him to create his own loopholes, and think he's too smart to be caught.
An honest man only seeks what was fairly intended by a contract - what the meeting of the minds was. If sloppy language gives you an unintended advantage or benefit you can exploit, it's still unethical to take it.
This isn't quite fair. A big chunk of them got that way through the old-fashioned, honest method of inheriting it.
:-)
The following happened some time ago to, ummmm, a friend of mine.
Leased car, form contract. Drafted in toto by dealership. Dealer rep forgets to fill in the blank where the amount of the lease-end balloon payment is supposed to be. Friend doesn't notice at time of purchase. New car, not high-end luxury, not compact or starter car.
Time comes to trade in car. Dealership says payoff figure is $X,XXX, which includes balloon payment. Friend says, "Sod off, no number in the blank means zero in the blank."
Ethical obligations of honest parties are?
To pay the amount that you understood you would have to pay when you made the contract.
And a car dealer who's a smart business man gives the honest man a hell of a deal on the next car; like dealer cost.
That's essentially what happened. I ended up trading up to a higher model, paying full sticker price, no haggling, and buying extras I otherwise wouldn't have.
In the ensuing years, I got stuck with enough fine print bank fees, credit card one-day late fees, hotel change fees, bogus speeding and traffic tickets witnessed only by a camera, and the like that the house has pulled soundly back ahead. So much for the fine art of American compromise.
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