The Ol' Ballfield

BORAS: Monetary Embellishments of Player Value for Make Benefit Glorious Agent of Base Ball

I am about to post a post that contains a lot of assumptions, so anyone feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Assumption number one:

An agent makes ten percent of his client's salary.

That's pretty common knowledge, isn't it? I remember being told that growing up, and I believe it was mentioned on Curb Your Enthusiasm at some point. I'm sure there are many stipulations in the contract between agent and client, but it seems like ten percent is a good number to go with. Today I got to wondering just how much money Scott Boras makes, and if it was more than the huge contracts he lands for his big-name player that everyone is always up-in-arms about.

Using Boras' Wikipedia page as well as BaseballReference.com's salary data, I did some estimating. I estimate that for the year 2006, Boras' salary came it at around much more than $30,138,977. In case you are too lazy or stupid to figure it out, yes, that is much more than Alex Rodriguez made this season.

This estimate includes:

1) No-longer clients whose current contracts were negotiated by Boras. (Barry Bonds, Miguel Cabrera, and Carlos Zambrano).

2) Young big-leaguers currently making close to league minimum that will eventually get huge deals. (Bobby Hill, Scott Kazmir, Zach Miner (I think), Xavier Nady, David Newhan, Anthony Reyes, Jered Weaver.)

This estimate DOESN'T include:

1) Daisuke Matsuzaka. (Boras will see none of the posting fee, but that's another eight-figure salary to tack on.)

2) Marketing and merchandising revenue, and all revenue that is not salary (including signing bonuses).

3) Extremely good prospects that will eventually get huge deals. (Stephen Drew, Luke Hochevar, Mike Pelfrey.)

4) New clients this offseason. (Barry Zito.)

I'm guessing Boras makes close to if not well over $40,000,000 a year, and that number will only go up. The funny thing is, if he had had even moderate success as a big-leaguer (Boras never advanced past AA in the Cubs' and Cardinals' systems), he wouldn't have made close to that kind of money; not only because no one in baseball makes that kind of money, but also because if it weren't for the revolutionary advances in player salary made by many of his negotiations, baseball salaries might still be close to where they were years ago. There's a reason Drew Henson tried baseball first, and Boras is a big part of that.

posted by Carnival @ 11/27/2006