Jack Marshall at the Hardball Times wrote a terrific essay about how Scott Boras is not quite as evil as he is portrayed.
Jack Marshall, according to his bio, is a professional ethicist, writer, lawyer and lifetime baseball enthusiast. He is the president of ProEthics, a national ethics training firm, and the writer of the Ethics Scoreboard.
So what conclusion does Marshall come to?
Scott Boras is demonstrably unethical in his professional practices in one important respect, beyond any reasonable argument, but not in the ways most people think he is....
...He is an agent, which means that he acts on behalf of his clients, after consultation with his clients, in their employ and at their pleasure. It was not Scott Boras who executed the escape provisions of J.D. Drew’s Dodger contract; it was J.D. Drew. Boras certainly told Drew that he thought the injury-prone outfielder could better his financial status by truncating his commitment, but it was up to Drew whether to do it or not.
Similarly, it was Alex Rodriquez, not Boras, who ultimately was responsible for exercising his option to become (for however short a time) a free agent to express his need for a contract greater than $25 million a year.
Not a bad point, and I dont disagree that the clients are ultimately responsible for their decisions (even if presented by Boras), but it still misses the heart of the matter about whether it is actually unethical for these guys to opt out of their contracts. The double standard held to these people - baseball players - is absurd and unwarranted.
A friend of mine was just laid off from his company of sixteen years. He told me how upset he was that a year ago he had turned down an offer to join a competitor, and now he is finding that there are no jobs available. The reason he turned the job down was out of loyalty to his long time employer. Unfortunately, in these times, this is not a rare story. The obvious response to this story is to question why the employee would feel loyalty to the company that was interested in him only as long as it helped their profit margins.
Here is anther way to look at it: if a player can get more money than he is making currently by shopping himself in the open market, then he is, by definition, earning less than market value. If a team is paying a player less than market value, wouldnt that team be the ones who are acting unethically?
The truth is that there is nothing unethical about, say, Alex Rodriguez opting out of his contract, regardless of whether the move was orchestrated by Rodriguez himself or his agent.
Marshall later gets in to a more interesting look at how Scott Boras may have conflicts of interest, because he has so many clients. For example, if an offer comes to Jason Varitek, he wouldnt try to insert Ivan Rodriguez in Varitek's place, so is he acting ethically towards I-Rod? The conclusion:
...The truth is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, it is Boras’ clients, not his negotiating adversaries, who are the victims of his unethical conduct.
All in all, it is an excellent article that hits on some truths and is well worth the read.
