Scott Boras has self-interest, yes, but he also has a fair point.
As the MLB lockout continues with dwindling hope for Opening Day to happen in late March as scheduled, the super-agent spoke to The Athletic about a wide range of topics, striking at the root of what he called baseball’s “non-competitive cancer.”
“I don’t think a lot of people really understood what the draft means to these major league teams,” Boras said. “In 2011 when they allowed (MLB) to put a cap on the draft, I heard general managers say things two weeks before (about) what they were going to do, and then completely alter their program once they got the rules and understood what was available to them.
“And that was, sell off your free agents, it’s a race to the bottom so I can get all these valued draft picks and get as many as I can. And it gave the fan base a method of illustrating that losing was OK; it was actually beneficial. And I think when you introduce that cancer, that non-competitive cancer, into the sport … the local fan does not go to the ballpark with the intent of having his team win every day. And I think we have to reintroduce that into our game.”
What Boras meant by the draft cap is that the MLB collective bargaining agreement assigned a contract value by slot of every pick in the first 10 rounds. What this has wound up yielding in practice is sophisticated front offices realizing that draft picks had fixed costs. You compile enough of those assets by losing enough games, and trading MLB-ready players for ever more prospects, and you might indeed contend for a championship in the long run — but it comes at the cost of several years of competitiveness, at least.
Boras’ clients include Gerrit Cole, Max Scherzer, Jose Altuve, Corey Seager, Alex Bregman, Zack Britton, Kris Bryant, Bryce Harper, Carlos Correa, Blake Snell and Anthony Rendon.
You could see Boras’ influence in an interview that Scherzer, who is a prominent voice in the MLBPA, gave to the Los Angeles Times bemoaning teams that are tanking.
“This negotiation is about the integrity of the game from our eyes,” Scherzer said in January. “We feel as players that too many teams have gone into a season without any intent to win during the past [collective bargaining agreement].
“Even though that can be a strategy to win in future years, we’ve seen both small-market and large-market clubs embrace tanking, and that cannot be the optimal strategy for the owners.”
Boras, of course, would prefer a world where he can hold teams over a barrel for the rights to his potential-superstar draft prospects, threatening the organizations not to select those players if they can’t meet required salary thresholds. With standard compensation slotting, that leverage goes out the window.
But, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong that the strategies of a bunch of MLB front offices, fluent in spreadsheets perhaps learned at Ivy League Institutions, have rendered a dozen or more teams deploying anti-competitive measures in the short run at any given time.