Scott Boras: maybe this story of MLB’s mega-agent will change your mind

We know Scott Boras as the most powerful baseball agent in the game today. Would he have become so influential had he not hit a roadblock in his own minor league career?

Hard to picture baseball mega-agent, Scott Boras, as anything other than the money-grubbing lawyer he is. Can you picture him as a 24-year-old, toiling away in baseball’s minor league system? The man who secured over $1B in contracts for his players this year alone, playing for $1300 a month.

Boras was a self-proclaimed, slow-footed second baseball in the St. Louis Cardinals system when his love for the game and loyalty to his organization were tested. His opinion of baseball forever changed with one simple transaction which most likely went unnoticed in all newspapers other than the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

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He was playing with the AA Arkansas Travelers when he had been traded from the only team he knew to their rival, the Chicago Cubs. Boras realized the game he played and dreamt about playing as a Major Leaguer was nothing more than a business.

Boras had continued to take college courses during the offseason so when injury and ineptitude derailed his career he became a lawyer. Something he noticed earlier in his minor league days propelled him to represent ballplayers.

From Stephanie Apstein of Sports Illustrated:

He noticed cut day in spring training, when two dozen young men would trudge, sobbing, to their beat-up cars. Most of them had signed out of high school. They had no education. They had no backup plan.

All along we have thought of Scott Boras as a greedy, money-monger, destined to set the market, and then set it again. The truth is he was just a boy with a dream which was dashed by the chess game that is baseball.

Suddenly the Goliath of the industry can be seen as someone who paid his dues as a David. And as said David he was motivated to take down the Goliath before him, the deep-pocketed owners.

I get the sense with every dollar Boras earns for his clients he looks at is as it’s one dollar he missed out on by not succeeding in baseball as a player, and one less dollar the Big Bad Wolf has in his pocket.

Scott Boras isn’t a negative trendsetter for the industry, he is a representation, a voice for those who need one.