If Holliday and “super-agent” Scott Boras are not careful St Louis is
liable to sign Jason Bay instead, or maybe just trade for a cheaper
OF alternative.
Given that the average salary for a major league ballplayer is now roughly 3 million a year, do players really need an agent like Scott Boras who insists on getting every possible dime in negotiations? Maybe a player is better off with an agent who finds a team that the player wants to play for (in a city he likes, or a team with a good chance to win, or a manager he appreciates)?
For instance, it seems that Johnny Damon would have really liked to stay with the Yankees, they did just win the World Series and he seemed to greatly enjoy his time in NY. But Boras demanded top dollar (3 years at 13 mill per year according to reports), so the Yankees signed Nick Johnson and basically told Damon to go seek work
elsewhere.
Another example is Matt Holliday. I guess I don’t blame Boras for trying to get top dollar for Holliday, whom everyone agrees is the top free agent available this year. But wouldn’t Matt be better off staying in St. Louis, even if he had to try and ‘scrape by’ on a 6
year/96 million dollar contract, instead of demanding an 8 year/150 million dollar deal no one thinks he will get? St. Louis is by all accounts one of the best places to play in all of baseball, with a team that virtually always is in the playoff hunt, great fans, and
Albert Pujols to take the hitting pressure off of Holliday.
If Holliday and “super-agent” Scott Boras are not careful St Louis is liable to sign Jason Bay instead, or maybe just trade for a cheaper OF alternative, and then Holliday might well end up like Adam Dunn last year – signing with a team (Washington in Dunn’s case) that has no chance at winning in the foreseeable future.
Once you get to 16 million a year, isn’t being in a great place to play more important than getting even more money? I think Holliday can feed his family on that amount, eh?
It would be nice to see players taking the best deal in terms of ‘situation’ in addition to pay. What happened to the days when players routinely DID take a little less to play where they want to? Matt Holliday should stick with St. Louis. He played awesomely there from the time they picked him up from Oakland and it’s one of the ultimate baseball towns. I’d personally love to see him overplay his hand to where the Red Sox turn around and grab him much like the Yankees have done in the past. But, that said, I think Jason Bay is putting himself in a bad situation as well with the Mets. He can’t truly want to play at Citi Field or for the Mets at this point in the team’s development but he’s putting himself into a corner where Boston was offering a lucrative deal that isn’t much less, but where he thrived and loved the city/team.
It’s nice to see players like John Lackey clearly take the right offer and choose to sign with a team because he truly wants to be there and because he can recognize that the offer being presented to him is an excellent one. If Boras were Lackey’s agent then he would probably have had to wait until February or late January to sign and quite likely could have wound up signing a deal with a less than desirable team and maybe for less than Boston offered him. If he DID manage to get more from another team it wouldn’t have been by a lot – just enough to beat A.J. Burnett’s deal from 2008.
Boras is a brilliant agent, but I still think he could get his players top dollar and yet not abandon his relationships with the teams at the same time. He does his job so well that he doesn’t need to constantly be breaking records with his signings, etc. He could put his skills towards impacting baseball positively by getting the right players signed by the right teams.