A lot of people have said that Scott Boras is ruining baseball, but usually when they say it they mean it in the economic, "big market vs. small market" kind of way. But Peter Gammons, perhaps the most respected baseball writer in the game, thinks Boras' impact has been far more tangible, that he's literally making players worse.
Gammons speaking now, from a radio interview:
He needs to be coached by people here and not by the people in California at the Scott Boras clinics. It's the same thing with [Luke] Hochevar last year when Kansas City gave him all that money, they gave him $4 million as a four-seam, curveball guy and they changed him into a two-seamer, slider guy this winter. He's got a 5.80 ERA at Double A which for $4 million doesn't hack it. With these agents there's too much tinkering. Agents don't know more about baseball than the people that coach it.
I blogged about this when the Royals selected Mike Moustakas, and folks like JoePa have been on it, too, but this bears repeating: Scott Boras is a devil. Maybe not the Devil, but one of his agents -- no pun intended, I mean this rather literally. Now, none of us are trying to decant the spirit of the man-devil into some quintessent gruel to
represent all things evil -- hey, he might be a nice guy, or maybe he's even half as interesting as Ari Gold, which would make him No. 1 in my book -- but one can't help feeling, after reading any piece on Scott Boras, that the man lives by a different moral code than the rest of us, which is to say no moral code, and that he's driven by a sort of nefarious impulse to bring Milton's Pandæmonium to Earth, like Beelzebub. That's him pictured to the right, that bloodsucking piece of s...Anyway. Just remember, all you kids thinking about striking it rich: you sleep with a devil and you're going to Hell. That simple, really.
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