Former Minor League Player Scott Boras Has a Major Voice in MLB Proposed Return
Scott Boras has been a power in Major League Baseball for more than three decades now.
He’s a been a super agent, perhaps The Super Agent, for so long that it’s difficult to think of him in any other way.
It wasn’t always that way, of course, as Sports Illustrated writer Stephanie Apstein points out in this profile of Boras today.
He was a minor league player in the Cardinals organization, and was disappointed to later be traded to the Cubs. The book on him was a good hitter but a poor defender, and as such he never made it above Double-A.
Boras started as an agent at the bottom, but made a name for himself quickly by making big money for his clients. He remembers when he was just getting started, he needed to talk with Oakland’s Billy Beane, at that point the No. 2 man in the A’s baseball structure behind general manager Sandy Alderson.
The trouble was, Boras didn’t have Beane’s number handy. He remembers that their kids went to the same school and he was able to look up Beane’s number in the school’s parent-teacher directory.
These days, finding phone numbers is no problem for Boras, who counts the A’s Sean Manaea and Matt Chapman among his clients and who also represents the A’s No. 1 pick from the June draft, Logan Davidson. He has a particular affinity to the A’s, and to the San Francisco Giants, too, as he grew up in Northern California and listened to the games of both teams living in the Sacramento and Stockton areas.
Boras’ influence is such that it makes headlines when he speaks his mind, as he did this week in saying he would urge Major League players to reject the owners’ proposal to start the 2020 season in July after the COVID-19 coronavirus lockdown. He contends that the negotiations on salary cuts made at the beginning of the pandemic should stand.
“The players I represent are unified in that they reached an agreement and they sacrificed anywhere from 30 to 40% of their salaries so that the games could amicably continue,” Boras said. “The owners represented during that negotiation that they could operate without fans in the ballpark. Based on that, we reached an agreement and there will not be a renegotiation of that agreement.”
Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3
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