Just when you think Scott Boras must be out of ideas ... actually, he’s never given us any reason to think that, because he’s always got a new one. Or two. All you gotta do is ask. It just occurred to me that Boras could write a pretty interesting book. And not even about being an agent. Just all the odd ideas about baseball he’s got.
Case in point! Just the other day – in the wake of the Kris Bryant Affair – Boras ideated to ESPN Chicago’s Jesse Rodgers about some sort of panel that would essentially dictate which players come to the majors and which ones don’t.
Can you imagine! Well, Boras sure can:
"The union or somebody may come in and say they've made a claim that this player is major league-ready, and to place him in the minor leagues would not be appropriate from a skills standpoint. Then, all of a sudden, it's subject to review by a panel like former managers and [other] baseball experts," Boras said. "It's up to the owners and the MLBPA to make sure they address this so it's not brought down to a level of representation of players."
In other words, Boras doesn't want to be the one advocating for his clients to make a team -- as he did with Bryant during spring training. The agent was critical of the Cubs after Bryant was sent to minor league camp despite leading all Cactus League and Grapefruit league hitters in home runs.
"It's an evaluation," Boras said. "It's objective in the sense that they're neutral."
But the evaluation itself would be subjective by it's very nature. Boras was reminded that this panel would essentially be making baseball decisions instead of front offices.
"The minute we have service measurements, we're telling a team what to do," Boras said.
No, “we” are not doing anything of the sort. When we have service measurements, we’re encouraging a team to do various things. But I do admire Boras’s rhetorical fun-house mirror, which essentially makes it sound as if he just wants to give some free will back to the front office.
I didn’t come here to kill Scott Boras again, though. Granted, it might seem like he’s trolling, again. He seems to have trolled Craig Calcaterra pretty good.
For sure, the notion that a panel of outsiders will set a general manager’s roster is pretty preposterous. Which is why I’m surprised that Boras didn’t suggest something that’s actually not unreasonable.
I’ll suggest, based just on what I’ve observed, that Scott Boras isn’t terribly upset by Kris Bryant having to spend a couple of weeks with Des Moines. I think what bothers him is that spending a couple of weeks in Des Moines might cost Kris Bryant a few million dollars. Boras has to at least seem upset by this. As an attentive representative of his client.
Well, hell, that’s easy to fix. You can even do it with a panel if you want. You could get a panel of “experts” together, have them look at every young player with at least 50 games in Triple-A the season before, and designate the five best prospects. Or the three best. Whatever. And those three are considered major leaguers, for service time only, on Opening Day.
Or forget about the panel. You could also come up with statistical criteria to come up with the list.
You think it’s crazy to allow an outsider to determine a player’s salary? Arbitrators do it every winter.
You think it’s crazy to allow statistical criteria to determine compensation? For many years, free agents were designated Type A, Type B, and Type C, based purely on (ridiculously simplistic) statistical criteria. Which affected, in a roundabout way, compensation.
We’re not going to have panels telling Theo Epstein who’s on the roster and who’s not. Manifestly. But it’s not at all hard to imagine a panel or a set of statistics deciding when Kris Bryant is eligible for free agency. That sort of thing’s already happening. I don’t see any overarching reason why it couldn’t happen again, if the union wanted to push for it.
Which the union’s highly unlikely to do. This seems to be a small problem looking for a big solution, and the union’s likely to hold its powder for bigger problems. Like this one.
Ah, but you thought I’d let Boras off so easy? Get a load of this:
Boras also has strong opinions about defensive shifting. He's against it, for the defender's sake. He believes it forces players to grasp jobs they haven't been trained to master.
"The communication is different because there's different people involved and there's fielding ground balls from unique places because you're never trained that way," Boras said of shifts. "I'm afraid it's going to seep into college and youth baseball."
Bryant made an error on Monday night while shifted over to the shortstop position, but Boras said it wasn't just about Bryant. He opined on what a player must be thinking. “‘I have to play five positions instead one,’” Boras stated.
If there’s ever been an empirical question, it’s this one. But do you think Boras has asked his team of analysts to actually answer it? I don’t. If he had any data, he probably would have shared it already.
Look, teams shift because it saves runs. Last year, shifts were up 63 percent over the year before. This year, shifts are up another 36 percent over last year. Teams will reach a point of diminishing returns, but probably haven’t found it yet. So Boras simply can’t reasonably argue that shifting leads to more runs.
What he might argue is that shifting is unsafe; that with players doing things they’ve not been trained to do, things they’ve not mastered, they’re more likely to get hurt. If he and the union can make a player-safety argument – you know, like they’re always doing when it comes to chewing tobacco – then maybe we’ve got something to talk about. There’s certainly plenty of data. Last season, 13,298 shifts. Is there a significantly elevated injury risk when the shift is on?
Again, show me something like that and we can talk.
