Meeting Scott Boras
On Wednesday, SI's Stephanie Apstein had a very clever cover story, writing on superagent Scott Boras' playing career.
Boras as player is a pretty fascinating story, and naturally also leaves plenty of room for jokes and kidding, especially if you believe that the Boras who played then is the same Mouth Who Roars now. And the idea that Boras would be surprised to be contacted to talk about his own playing career speaks to some humility we just don't normally see amid his general bluster, or his performance-art pieces during Winter Meetings.
If you've been around baseball long enough, you have a Scott Boras story, and I'm no different. But my favorite is still my first, when I was still a bit wide-eyed and new to the baseball beat.
I came in mid-stream to my first baseball beat experience, covering the White Sox for Comcast Sports Net in 2010 starting at midseason, after spending a year following the Chicago Blackhawks in their successful quest to snap a 49-year Stanley Cup-less streak. My ability to use a spring training to make contacts and connect with players didn't exist, so outside of the White Sox organization, I was desperately trying to make up for lost time.
In 2011, I got the chance to start fresh and connect with the White Sox in a way I hadn't the season previous. New free agent sign Adam Dunn talked a lot of Texas high school football with me. Chris Sale, Edwin Jackson and Omar Vizquel all talked a little fashion. Some Latin players, like Dayán Viciedo and Alexei Ramírez, were willing to sit down and do interviews with me in Spanish, after getting past the surprise of my request. Will Ohman, bless his soul, alternated between hazing me (?) and talking a lot of music.
But really, it's the off-field contacts that are as important, and so often more important, on the beat. Walking the line between getting played by an agent and earnestly reaching out for a player's side of a story is an unexpected, extracurricular challenge. While I fancied myself more a storyteller and entertainer than news-breaker — I'd tweet analysis of Ozzie Guillén's colorful comments as some thoughtful social media content rather than break my thumbs to simply speed the comments out into the ether to play for likes and retweets, for example.
Anyway, when I came back to my hotel room in Glendale one day in spring and saw I had an urgent message to call Scott Boras, I was intrigued. Did he see my promise and want to give me an exclusive something-or-other? Was this his modus operandi, wining and dining new beats at Golden Corral in exchange for favorable coverage? Did someone in the White Sox org hip Scott to the unorthodox connections I was making with players? Was he just, like, Brett, I get you?
The day previous, White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf had conducted his yearly "state of the team" roundtable with beat reporters. I had known the owner more through my work with his Bulls, writing innumerable features for the team prior to this beat work, so tone of the conversation was comfortable, though measured and monitored. Because I was one of just two beats not on a newspaper and thus able to utilize the endless cyberspace to write without regard to word count, I took our collective transcription of the Q&A and published it in full. While that transcript is lost to time (somewhat hilariously, MLB Trade Rumors still has a post up about my article, but the article itself is stuck on a CSN server farm somewhere), the follow-up story is not.
Suffice to say, Scott did not make a favorable impression with me. He reamed me for "not getting his side" of ... a Q&A with the White Sox owner? I tried over and over again to explain to him that this was a transcript of a conversation, Reinsdorf's take on the team and its inner workings, not a contentious gotcha press conference. But Boras wasn't having it. I was in deep trouble for not reaching out to him.
[The controversy surrounded Reinsdorf's assertion that Joe Crede's agent, Boras, had done him a disservice by not agreeing to a multi-year offer from the club. Crede's career was cut short by back injuries, and at the time he was on his way out of baseball, and Reinsdorf rubbed a little salt in that injury with a comment that made Boras appear negligent in looking out for Crede.]
Boras was very curt. I wasn't given much of a chance to speak, although I'm not sure I had much to say except, "Scott, you know what a group Q&A is, right?"
When I put down the phone, I felt terrible. But pretty quickly, I did start to smile and laugh. I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, and perhaps, contrary to my daydreaming, Scott was just another guy in the baseball world aching to haze the new guy, even some little ol' nobody from podunk Chitown.
I suppose it speaks to my optimistic nature that my first inclination to think that an out-of-the-blue contact from the most prominent player agent on the planet was something positive in nature. It wasn't.
But I got a laugh out of it, and now almost a decade later, I get to spin a yarn about it.
For the record, in spite of this, I like Scott Boras. Broadly speaking, he's good for baseball. He's colorful, and passionate. Even if you paint him as an egoist whose clients serve him and not the other way around, his dogged work on their behalf has kept the balance of labor in baseball as even as possible.
And, most importantly: He loves baseball.
Boras speaking out this week urging players to reject any notion of further compromises to play in 2020 is spot-on. While his bravado may not play well in the sticks, he speaks in defense of the common man, often in those sticks.
OK, the common multimillionaire — but that trickles down easier to the common man than scraps from the owners' table do.