‘Harper’s bazaar has begun’ declares Boras
Harper’s free agency means Scott Boras is in his element, selling
CARLSBAD, CALIF. — The joke was either seven years in the making or it rolled off the top of Scott Boras’ head.
Either way, the agent was ready to unleash it when asked about Bryce Harper at baseball’s general manager meetings on Wednesday.
“Well, certainly Harper’s bazaar has begun,” said Boras, likening Harper’s free agency to the classic women’s magazine, and he did not stop there. “It’s fashionable, it’s historical, it’s elite, global, certainly. And certainly it has inspirations that deal with grey shoes and grey hair, inspirations on the part of Bryce.”
The delivery — dry, deadpanned, direct — was very Boras. So was the setting, outside at the Omni La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, at the top of a short flight of stairs, with dozens of reporters packed tightly around him, tape recorders on and iPhone cameras fixed in the air. It was all an on-the-nose reminder of how much of this week and off-season centres on the 66-yearold agent. He represents Harper. The entire league is wondering where Harper could land after he declined the Washington Nationals’ 10-year, US$300-million offer, which materialized at the end of September and would have been the largest free agent deal in the history of U.S. sports.
Boras makes this sort of State of His Agency Address at each annual general managers meeting, and it is part examination of the sport’s issues, part promotion of his clients, part chance to see how many metaphors he can use to describe baseball and its free agent mark. This year’s hinted at how he is selling Harper to teams, and just how much he thinks the 26-year-old is worth.
And he laid that out in a way only he can.
“When you’re in a category of talent and player in the game that rarely is there, you’re talking about a process I think that is very unconventional because you’re dealing with a generational player,” Boras said. “And what is a generational player? That is that he holds the qualities of elite performance, he holds the youngest age in free agent history to be available for the greatest number of elite years of performance.
“I know that anyone who’s done what Bryce Harper has done at 25, if you’ve done that you are almost a lock to be a Hall of Fame player,” he continued. “And we have exhibited this in our documents to the owners we have met with, and we clarified this 14 different ways.”
He did not go through those 14 ways on Wednesday, at least not with the reporters, but his pitch was broken into clear segments: Harper is young, and would still be 36 years old at the end of the decadelong deal Boras seems to be seeking. He is marketable, hair flip and all, and had a large hand in helping the Nationals raise television ratings and attendance numbers since he debuted as a 19-year-old phenom in 2012. And he has been close to peerless at the plate throughout that time, compiling a 1.109 OPS during his MVP year in 2015, putting him in a category with Hall of Famers such as Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial, Willie McCovey, Hank Greenberg and George Brett.
This is what Boras will tell any interested teams in the coming couple of months, and the Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs are a few franchises that have been linked to Harper, along with the Nationals. Washington’s offer included no opt-outs and is believed to be “off the table” after five weeks, since the team set an expiration date to give itself time to approach the market with a Harper-less future in mind. But the Nationals could still circle back to Harper, according to multiple people familiar with the situation, and ripen their initial deal to keep Harper in Washington.
“To suggest that Ted Lerner is not savvy about acquisition of rights, I think he’s the wealthiest owner in the game, so I’d say that he’s adept and wise,” Boras said when asked about the Nationals principal owner’s approach to Harper’s free agency. “And obviously if you’ve got the ability to negotiate and present something when no one else can, I think any owner would want to take opportunity to advance it and let the player know how they feel before he exercised his right and went on to the process.”
That all led Boras’ anticipated appearance to become even more of a spectacle on Wednesday. It was not on the event’s official schedule — the league would never do that — but “Boras talking at 2” started to course through the lobby and hallways by late morning. At 1:40 p.m., reporters trickled into a courtyard flanked by boutique stores on one side and the resort’s front entrance on the other. They scattered into pockets of the open space, stuffing hands in pockets, burying faces in phones, looking unsure of where to stand, as if everyone was thrust back in time and into an awkward middle school dance.