The Zen of Scott Boras

Make it $300 million and you've got yourself a deal.

For as long as I can remember, in any setting, big businesses have been viewed as the bad guys and the workers have been viewed as the good guys. I think this started with Karl Marx’s theory that a profit can only be made by a business owner by exploiting the worker. Marx’s theory, now dismissed by economists, was that the value of a product was set by each person’s work in making it, and that the owner of the business added no value to anything. Thus, the only way a profit could be made was if you exploited your workers (paid them less than the value of their efforts). Obviously, this ignores the value added by the risk undertaken by the business owner. The business person had to invest his time, money and resources into making the product, and should be rewarded if it ends up making money.

Interestingly, you never hear anyone say that they feel like professional athletes are being exploited. Even Karl Marx would have found this ludicrous (I think). These are people that make (on the low end) hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. Top players in their respective sports now make tens of millions of dollars every year. So it’s hard to say they’re being exploited, when the President of the United States makes a paltry $400,000, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court makes $217,400 (John Roberts reportedly made over a million dollars practicing law the year before he become a US Supreme Court Justice), and your very capable family physician only makes $150,000 (and he’s handing over part of that to malpractice insurers, because you’ll sue him if he makes a mistake).

That being the case, you have to assume that if the Yankees can afford to pay Alex Rodriguez $30 million per year, that the people that own the team are making a little money of their own, right? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know this for sure. I do know that I hear owners complain about how high the salaries are, but they couldn’t keep escalating if the money wasn’t coming from somewhere right.

If you follow baseball, you may have heard of an agent named Scott Boras. Boras is associated with everything that’s wrong with baseball and the world. He consistently gets players top dollar. He got this year’s number one overall draft choice over $15 million. He got the Yankees first basemen $180 million over 8 years. He’s innovative and sneaky. He sometimes uses the rules to his advantage, once famously using a technicality to have two of his clients declared free agents outside the draft, and allowing them to sign for a lot more money than they otherwise would have. He might be the best at what he does.

What makes Scott Boras especially interesting is that almost every baseball fan you meet hates his guts. His responsibility to his clients is to get them the best deal he can. He’s good at getting them very good deals. And people hate him for it, because it usually means that the top talent goes to the teams with the most money to spend. But people don’t hate the players for taking the largest deal (which is simply logical to do, all other factors being equal – you can’t play baseball forever).

People don’t hate the owners. After all, they’re in the same boat we are. They’re poor and lonely and just want to win games, but greedy super agents like Scott Boras are ruining the game, right? Right?

It’s unique, that the employees and their agents are viewed as greedy for taking top dollar. The owners escape being viewed as Wal-Mart. The owners would not pay so much that they no longer made money. They are running businesses, and you can’t stay in business losing money every year. I don’t have a point, other than this: lay off poor (he’s rich), defenseless (actually, he’s very capable of defending himself) Scott Boras. I actually just think this is pretty interesting. Thanks for reading.