Calling Scott Boras’ Bluff
We are perhaps mere moments away from Mark Teixeira’s epic as-promised before Christmas decision on a new place to hit baseballs in 2009. Maybe. We don’t really know.
It now appears that it is between the Red Sox and the Nationals. The Angels have already said they are out. The Yankees said they never were in it. And the Orioles keep hoping he’ll take the hometown discount, which doesn’t really seem likely given what’s transpired over the last week or so.
How do we really know it’s coming to a head, even when we don’t really know? Scott Boras’ favorite writer, SI’s Jon Heyman, says the Yankees are stepping up negotiations with Tex, which would presumably be the same negotiations the owner denied were taking place. (Update: Or not)
At this rate, GateHouse won’t have to worry about its lawsuit because the Internet will simply implode. Honestly, Teixeira stopped being interesting the day after Red Sox owner John Henry dropped his bombshell that the Sox were out of it, and within 12 hours or so, every baseball pundit dismissed the whole thing as white noise.
But here’s what is interesting.
The way the whole “negotiation” thing works is the agent, in this case Boras, tries to get as many teams interested in a player as possible. That’s called creating a market. If no market exists, the agent simply creates one with a well-timed phone call to somebody at the Globe, the Sun, or the LA Times. Sources say negotiations are heating up…
In the past baseball teams were run by people who believed in the power of the press and the mere mention of say, the Yankees, would add a year and a couple of zeroes to the end of the last contract offer. Not anymore.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Henry’s unsolicited email to the press was a clumsy, but still artful, PR campaign on the part of the Sox to flush out the misinformation. If someone really did have a 10-year, $200 million offer on the table, let the guy sign it. And it worked. No one did and Tex is still unsigned.
In normal times baseball teams would ignore the agent’s ruse. What’s is to them if somebody like the Sox gives somebody a bigger deal, maybe at the expense of going after someone else? But that’s not what’s happening here. The Angels even went the extra step of announcing what their last offer was, in effect saying this is the market and we’re no longer in it. Why?
Because in December of 2008 baseball teams have a vested interest in keeping the market for players low. If Teixeira signed a trumped-up $200 million deal based on hearsay, then maybe Manny Ramirez gets a fourth year, or Pat Burrell gets three years, and so on down the line until some poor sucker is giving Jay Payton $10 million over two years.
So are baseball teams conspiring to keep salaries for ballplayers artificially low, or in other words, colluding? That’s a tricky bit, but one could sanely argue that teams are actually deflating the salary bubble rather than sticking a pin in it. (One would also have to prove that there is an agreement among teams in place, as well).
We’ll know a little more when Teixiera finally does sign later today, or later this week, or next week…
UPDATE: Well we know more now and Teixeira is a Yankee. So, whoops. I guess the owner was lying and Heyman had good information. The perils of blogging.
