Old Dogs And New Tricks

Here’s a post from mlbtraderumors.com which takes agent Scott Boras to task for misreading the current market and apparently costing his players a lot of money based on offers rejected earlier this off-season.  The post makes a good point, and what strikes me about it is that Boras’ mistake is, in a way, the same one Giants GM Brian Sabean made last year.

Boras’ and Sabean’s methods work well in years when the economy is doing well and the market for free agent players and players’ salaries in general are up.

Sabean’s method was to hone in on the players he liked most and sign them as quickly as possible before the market went through the roof later in the off-season.  He got burned big-time with this strategy last off-season, when he signed Edgar Renteria for probably $10 million more for two seasons, than he would have paid if he’d waited a month or two longer to make the signing.

I thought Sabean’s sticking to the old model was a big mistake last year, because the banks crashed (or very nearly so) in September 2008, before the season was even over.  It wasn’t hard to see that the 08/09 off-season wasn’t going to be a good one for any but the very best free agents.  In fact, if the Yankees hadn’t been eager to fill some pressing needs in a way they didn’t need or weren’t willing to do this off-season, 08/09 would have been a horrible year for free agents.

However, Sabean seems to have learned something from last year’s fiasco, because he was much more patient this off-season and has been rewarded by having Bengie Molina fall back into the Giants’ lap at a salary and for a term (one year only) the Giants wanted.

Meanwhile, Scott Boras worked his usual magic with Matt Holliday, one of the best available free agents this off-season, getting the Cardinals to make Holliday an offer reportedly much higher than any other team made.  Holliday’s deal was down-right excessive compared to the amount for which the Mets signed Jason Bay, the most similar free agent to Holliday.

Boras’ strategy is always to make utterly outrageous salary requests for his free agents early in the off-season and work the bidding up to a frenzy before signing deals late in the off-season.  This strategy has worked fantastically well for Boras when the market is up or when he is dealing with the very best available players.

For Johnny Damon, Jarrod Washburn and Felipe Lopez, Boras’ usual strategy looks like a big mistake, absent Boras’ famed ability to get somebody to bid against himself this February.  It sure doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

The thing about Boras’ clients is that this is why they select Boras in the first place.  Most of the time, his strategy works, and even this year, I suspect that the failure of the strategy has as much to do with the players’ unreasonable expectations in this time of steep recession as it does Boras’ failure to adjust to the current market realities.

I don’t know what kind of advice Boras gave these players when they received the offers they’ve since rejected, but I’d bet that no matter what he told them they weren’t yet ready to accept how bad the market for free agents really is this off-season.  I also note that a few of Boras’ clients have signed short deals, like Adrian Beltre, with the idea that the economy will be better and the teams less stingy next off-season.

As mentioned in the mlbtraderumors.com post above, Boras has signed a number of his player-clients to solid deals this off-season.  Here’s a current list of his clients, also from mlbtraderumors.com.

One thing worth noting is that when you have an agent with this many clients, some players are going to get burned because the strategies that may work best for the group of players as a whole (and thus makes Boras the most commissions), will end up burning a few players.  With his usual strategy, Boras obtained a great contract for Matt Holiday and a very large commission.  It obviously hasn’t worked as well for the mid-tier free agents.

I wish I could feel sorrier for the more unfortunate Boras clients.  However, they all have to know what they’re getting by choosing Boras as their agent, and they have plenty of other good choices out there.  I, for one, won’t shed a lot of tears if any of Damon, Washburn or Lopez has to play baseball for only $2 or $3 million in 2010.