Reading up on free-agent signings in preparation for the upcoming baseball season, I’m struck by how poorly the über-successful super-agent Scott Boras played his hands the past few months. He’s managed to put some of his older players in terrible contract situations (Jason Varitek, Manny Ramirez, and others), losing them millions of dollars because he made daunting contract demands– making obviously hyperbolic claims about their abilities to deliver team success –as the economy collapsed. It’s all the more remarkable because these errors are not based on a kind of moonlighter’s presumption, i.e., like Boras’ bizarre and hilarious proposals to turn the World Series into an Academy Awards-like celebrity event a couple years ago. They are egregious mistakes in the very domain where he is supposed to be, dare we say, sans pareil.
It strikes me that like a great many of us, Boras has the flaws associated with his most conspicuous strengths. He has shown himself to be a virtuoso of playing teams against one another, always dauntlessly assuming they had more money to spend on players than they would willingly admit, and forcing them to commit to players for years rather than see than sign with other teams if at least a part of their prime was yet to come (that is, even if the player was almost a statistical certainty to start decling two or three years into the contract, Boras could get a club to sign for four years, so that they wouldn’t miss out on those last two prime years– or suffer through them in the form of a still top-tier player making a special effort to defeat them 10-20 games a year). Boras had a con-man’s fascimile of righteous certainty; he was willing to lie, manipulate and bluff his way into contracts for his players, and he was very good at it.
But Boras apparently believed that lying, manipulation and bluffing had been so perfected in his person that he could produce astonishing and extended results for his players regardless of circumstances. So even if his players were clearly already past their prime, even if teams really did have less money to spend in the midst of a severe economic crisis, he assured his players that they should reject generous offers in favor of the spectacular offers his huckster-magic was sure to conjure for them in the next week or month. It’s only with the approach of spring training that Boras has apparently had to tell several of the players he represents that an extended spectacular will not be forthcoming, and a mere interval of plenty will have to do.
That Boras attributed his past success not to his adroit adaptation to or exploitation of reality in a time of exceptional general prosperity, but his ability to create realities ex nihilo, is a sadly familiar tale in American life over the last ten years (see: early-term Bush staffer on background, “we’re an Empire now. We create reality” for more details). But this delusion is more than an American failing; for not all strengths are created equal, and clever, adroit exploitation of others tends ultimately to produce destructive illusions of creative power in a way that genuine virtue does not. Boras reminds us that there is a price for assuming our success in a jostled and harried world is entirely a function of our very own glibly deployed but superabundant genius: we pay for it with an increasing estrangement from reality. And that is a price still steeper than the lost millions of Messrs. Varitek and Ramirez.
