Special Agent

It is a year-round job, the profession Scott Boras chose more than two decades ago, that chose him, representing baseball players, loosening money from owners who’d become more accustomed to counting it, grinding at a system that did not grasp free agency until 30 years ago.

But winter, that’s his season.

When baseball’s winter meetings begin today in Anaheim, the floor will be Boras’, and baseball’s owners will presume he’ll want the carpets and ash cans to close the deal.

His client list includes many of the prime free agents of the off-season -- outfielders Carlos Beltran, J.D. Drew and Magglio Ordonez, third baseman Adrian Beltre, catcher Jason Varitek and starting pitchers Derek Lowe and Kevin Millwood.

Boras will arrive from his Newport Beach offices, his Range Rover crammed with files and three-ring binders, Beltre’s binder alone 10 sections long, in the end predicting a Hall of Fame career.

There will be other players to be had; only a few of the 200 or so free agents have signed in the early weeks of the game’s spending period, leaving Pedro Martinez, Carl Pavano, Carlos Delgado and Edgar Renteria and others still browsing.

It will be Boras and his collection of 30-and-under hitters in particular, however, who push the conversations, drive the meetings and change the lineups of some of baseball’s high-end franchises.

Three weeks before the first visiting general manager arrived in Southern California, Boras, casual in jeans, sneakers and a sweater vest, sat at the head of a long rectangular table.

Behind him, the Scott Boras Corp. tended to its clients on telephone lines and computer screens. An MIT graduate searched the Internet, collecting information on team owners and their operations and revenue flows. A former NASA programmer maintained a massive database of statistics and contracts. Scouts reported from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Japan, Taiwan and a dozen U.S. cities.

From the small waiting room, where back issues of Baseball America are fanned on a coffee table, and in the aisles between cubicles, the office has the tenor of baseball’s 31st franchise, starting with its owner, a slick and smart former minor league player who erected an empire negotiating for ballplayers’ rights and contracts and became wealthy and famous doing it.

“It’s what the whole system is about,” Boras said. “Owners line their pockets on the backs of players. Players line their pockets on the back of the system. We -- all of us, owners, players, agents -- are all part of that system. Our job in the system is to make sure the integrity of the system is not violated by anyone. That means you don’t want to go out and sell something that’s not real.”

In the late ‘90s, when conglomerates began buying up agents and their clients, Boras was approached first, he said. He had the players, with more coming in every June draft. He had the thriving business. He had the game’s attention. He had what he wanted already.

He declined an offer, he said, “for millions and millions and millions of dollars.”

“I will never sell my clients,” he said. “The fact of the matter is, I love this game. I’m doing OK. It would have been a much better business decision to sell it.... [But] I would never do it, and I was one of the only majors who didn’t do it. How I measure success is always going to be how I serve the interest of my clients. It’s not going to be the fact that I make a certain amount of money. The reality of it is, when I answer the money question, the litmus test came for me seven years ago and I answered it.”

On his way from Scott Boras the agent to Scott Boras the corporation, including sports psychology and sports fitness arms for his clients, Boras negotiated the first $100-million (Kevin Brown) and $200-million (Alex Rodriguez) contracts in major league history. He represented big names and, for owners and general managers, big problems, arriving on their doorsteps with the binders and an unapologetic industriousness.

Jilted owners have protested his tactics, claiming he fabricated competition among teams to drag another year and a few more millions from a market that wouldn’t otherwise yield it. Boras, who calls it “puffing the market,” said it’s untrue.

When Brown, then 33, left the San Diego Padres and signed a watershed seven-year, $105-million contract with the Dodgers after the 1998 season, Larry Lucchino, then the Padres’ president, moped, “I’m in mourning. Not for the Padres, but for baseball.”

As for Boras’ role in his private memorial service, Lucchino said, “The Dodgers were bidding against themselves. We’re operating in a wide-open system of liar’s poker.”

Colorado Rocky owner Jerry McMorris later revealed he had bid $81 million over six years for Brown, and so perhaps had driven the Dodgers to add another year -- and the use of a private jet -- to their offer. Boras requested an apology from Lucchino. None came. Six years later, Lucchino serves as president of the Boston Red Sox, whose catcher Varitek is a free agent and a Boras client.

This month, after a few early negotiations went nowhere, Chicago White Sox General Manager Kenny Williams told reporters, “I do not expect to sign any Scott Boras clients. Let’s just say that we both respectfully agree to disagree on the value of his players.”

So long, Magglio Ordonez. This week, the White Sox did not offer him arbitration, and Thursday signed free-agent outfielder Jermaine Dye to replace him.

For every publicly spat criticism of Boras, a dozen are held in the mutterings of club officials, wary that the next attractive player, or their next first-rounder, could be a Boras man.

That is not to say all players desire to become such, or remain so. Last season alone, Boras lost superstars Barry Bonds, who’d jumped from Beverly Hills Sports Council and then returned there, and Gary Sheffield, whom Boras has sued. According to a source, Beltran, the prize in this winter’s marketplace and a longtime Boras client, was interviewing other agents as recently as September before deciding to remain with Boras.

Speaking broadly, Boras said, “I’m not a ‘yes man.’ I’m not.... The reality of it is, if you have philosophical differences about what is in the best interests of the athlete in other subjects, subjects other than contract negotiations, I’m going to espouse those.”

As each of his three children -- two sons and a daughter -- arrived in their preteen years and began to suspect not everyone held their father the superagent in the same regard as they did, Boras said he would educate them on the mini-traumas of a life tendered publicly.

He would hold aloft the morning newspaper. Any morning, it seemed, would do. He would locate the inevitable front-page article about the sitting U.S. president and read aloud, eventually finding the paragraphs he sought.

“What we’ll do for the next week,” he’d say, “we’re going to read articles about the president of the United States. We’re going to keep track of all the positive and negative things that are said about him. This is the man that holds the highest honor in the world. He holds the best job in the world. I want you to know that sometimes when you have the best job in the world, a job that people covet, there’s positive and negative things said about you.”

By the end of the week, he said, they’d get it.

Though, perhaps, the Boras brood might not have been prepared to read about their father the “very, very bad man. Exquisitely bad, in a foreclose-on-the-farm sort of way.” (Chicago Tribune).

Or, their father the “Most Hated Man in Baseball” (Esquire).

Or, their father, “everything that’s wrong with sports, and always has been, and always will be.” (Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling).

Or, their father, the “ever-blustering ... avenging agent.” (New York Daily News).

And ... oh, pick your baseball blog. It’s cold out there, particularly in the game’s suffering markets, to whom the system has assigned the mission of drafting and developing big leaguers for the Yankees and Red Sox, among a few others.

In places such as Kansas City, Oakland, Cleveland, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Minnesota and Montreal -- all low-rent, or made so by front-office mismanagement -- their baseball heroes are taken away and replaced by strangers.

Or they are not replaced at all.

The reason, as occasionally adopted by local ownership, is rising salaries.

Into that widening gap strides Boras, and his upper-crust clients, and his reputation for wringing every quarter from negotiations that end only after he has swept the vault.

By the time Kevin Brown is out of San Diego and Alex Rodriguez is gone from Seattle, when draftee J.D. Drew ditches Philadelphia for the Northern League and Carlos Beltran is traded from Kansas City because the Royals believe they have no other choice, the man standing on the edge of the podium, beside the assistant to the assistant to the general manager, is Boras.

Boras was raised in Elk Grove, Calif., a farming community between Lodi and Sacramento. He played five minor league seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs. When knee surgery ended his baseball career in 1978, Boras returned to school, where he earned a doctorate in industrial pharmacology and a law degree.

After a brief time as a medical litigator, Boras became a sports agent in 1982. A year later, he advised pitcher Tim Belcher, the No. 1 overall pick by the Minnesota Twins in the June draft, to refuse the standardized offer of $125,000 as a signing bonus and hold out. Belcher was selected six months later by the Yankees in a supplemental draft, and, though Belcher never pitched for the Yankees, Boras had picked his fight and set a career course for redefining how owners compensate their players, even their prospective players.

He built his practice on college pitchers; Georgia Tech’s Brown, Michigan’s Jim Abbott, Evansville’s Andy Benes, Louisiana State’s Ben McDonald, Miami’s Alex Fernandez and Wichita State’s Darren Dreifort, among many, were his clients.

Rick Monday, as the first pick in the first draft in 1965, signed for $104,000. Shawon Dunston signed for $150,000 as the first overall pick 17 years later, by which time, according to Boras, major league salaries had increased 10 times and franchise values 15 times.

“That’s when we realized,” Boras said, “ ‘Uh-oh, what we have here is a servitude.’ They have no union. They have no representation. They have nothing.”

By the end of the next 17-year period, high-end first-rounders were receiving $4 million and more in signing bonuses. Four players in the 2002 draft signed for at least that much.

“So,” Boras said, “this element of my reputation, you have to remember when I came in in 1982, this had been static for 17 years.... My reputation was not brought to these teams by major league contracts; it was brought by defending young men.”

In fact, when not found in the hours after having been outbid for a Boras player -- and when all of their Boras clients have been safely signed and tucked away -- many club officials profess an admiration for the agent. One high-ranking local baseball executive called him “the most powerful agent I’ve ever seen.”

Slate magazine called him “the Marvin Miller of his age.” Miller is the legendary executive director of the players’ union, a Godfather figure to the modern players who bother to learn of him.

The union’s current leader, Donald Fehr, said, “Scott is, and for a very long time has been, a very effective representative of players. He’s one of those people who, if you have an issue in your field, you’d consider him representing you. He’s an important agent and has been for a long time.”

To those who view Boras as something other than a man providing a service, as a killer of national pastimes, and also perhaps explaining his purpose in an equally player-first universe, Fehr said, “Your task is to do the best job you can do with the people you represent. That’s the standard to judge people by, the effects of the effects, whatever they are.”

Jerry Colangelo, then owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, once said, “He understands the game of leverage,” and to that Boras smiled. He rapped on the binder open before him, the names of the 30 franchises on 30 tabs, between them information that rarely leaks from the teams’ executive offices.

“Leverage,” he said, “is information.”

And so the Scott Boras Corp. whirred, generating the particulars of the next big payday for the next big player. A few clubs are digesting the possibility of a 10-year, $200-million contract for Beltran. Beltre, at only 25, was second to Bonds for National League most valuable player. Boras’ research projects Beltre’s numbers one day would surpass those of the best third basemen ever, well beyond what Mike Schmidt, Eddie Mathews and George Brett did.

Premium players, Boras said, deserve premium contracts. They benefit the franchises, he said, and benefit the game. That’s where he arrives.

“In the big world, our game is about the 0-2 pitch,” Boras said. “I’ve got these people to represent. You know you better be prepared. You better be prepared for the challenges of the day. That means information, the truth of the matter, knowing what you’re doing is based upon hard, hard information.”

In the end, there are very simple methods of engagement. He has the player. They have the need. Everybody gets something.

There are firm principles in the process, that which begins with a telephone call and ends, for one, in a news conference, the agent among the beaming participants.

“Ability to pay,” Boras said, “is not a negotiation.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Still Out There

Notable remaining baseball free agents (a-offered arbitration and may negotiate with former team through Jan. 8; players have until Dec. 19 to accept offers):

NATIONAL LEAGUE

*--* Player Pos Team a-Adrian Beltre 3B Dodgers Jose Lima RHP Dodgers a-Odalis Perez LHP Dodgers a-Richie Sexson 1B Arizona J.D. Drew OF Atlanta Russ Ortiz RHP Atlanta a-Jaret Wright RHP Atlanta Moises Alou OF Chicago a-Matt Clement RHP Chicago Barry Larkin SS Cincinnati a-Carl Pavano RHP Florida a-Carlos Beltran OF Houston a-Roger Clemens RHP Houston Kevin Millwood RHP Philadelphia Eric Milton LHP Philadelphia a-Mike Matheny C St. Louis a-Edgar Renteria SS St. Louis a-David Wells LHP San Diego Robb Nen RHP San Francisco Tony Batista 3B Washington

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AMERICAN LEAGUE

*--* Player Pos Team a-Pedro Martinez RHP Boston a-Jason Varitek C Boston a-Derek Lowe RHP Boston Roberto Alomar 2B Chicago Magglio Ordonez OF Chicago Juan Gonzalez OF Kansas City Corey Koskie 3B Minnesota Carlos Delgado 1B Toronto

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