Boras: Braves’ title was aided by others tanking
CARLSBAD, Calif. — Major League Baseball’s most influential agent said the sport was the victim of a “competitive cancer” caused by teams unloading veterans to accumulate draft picks and that the Atlanta Braves’ World Series title was a direct result of other franchises tanking.
Speaking on Wednesday at the general managers’ meetings, Scott Boras backed the demands of the players’ association for changes in the collective bargaining agreement that expires Dec. 1. The sport is braced for a lockout that would be baseball’s ninth work stoppage but first since 1995.
“This is the Easter Bunny delivering rotten eggs,” he said in front of Bob’s Steak & Chop House at the Omni La Costa Resort & Spa. “Every team says: ‘I need to do this because it’s my only option, knowing I can’t reach a divisional crest, I can’t get in the playoffs.’”
Atlanta was 51-53 when it obtained outfielders Adam Duvall, Eddie Rosario and Jorge Soler along with relief pitcher Richard Rodriguez in four swaps in the hours before the July 30 trade deadline. Two weeks before that, the Braves had added outfielder Joc Pederson from the free-falling Chicago Cubs
“We have seen the championship in 60 days,” Boras said. “The rules allow them to be a less than .500 team at Aug. 1 and add four players, five players from teams that no longer wanted to compete, and for very little cost change the entirety of their team and season.
“And we saw this unfold to the detriment of teams that create at vast expense, planning and intellect and won over 100 games. In doing all this, we have now created an understanding that a fan would not know who the true team is until, frankly, the trading deadline.”
Rosario was MVP of the National League Championship Series and Soler was MVP of the World Series as the Braves won MLB’s top title for the first time since 1995.
“The Atlanta Braves are the Atlanta Braves because tanking teams said, ‘I want to get to the bottom to get those draft picks,’” Boras said.
Teams draft in the reverse order of their regular-season records.
Boras blames behavior on restraints imposed on amateur spending in 2012. The caps came as the Cubs and the Houston Astros undertook rebuilds that resulted in World Series titles, informing decisions by other clubs to tear down.
Boras represents many top draft picks and has lost revenue because of the system of draft signing pools that no team has exceeded by more than 5%.
“It created an incentive for the race to the bottom, because now we have half the major league teams at some time during the season being noncompetitive, trading off their players, making the game and the season very different than what it was intended to be, and that was having an incentive to win every game that you play,” he said.
Boras represents five of the eight men on the union’s executive subcommittee: Zack Britton, Gerrit Cole, James Paxton, Max Scherzer and Marcus Semien, who switched his agency to Boras last month. Jason Castro, Francisco Lindor and Andrew Miller are the other members.
Castro, at $3.5 million, is the only one of the eight who earned less than $12 million this year. Just 86 players among 1,695 who played in the major leagues this season earned $12 million or more as of Aug. 31, including prorated shares of signing bonuses.
Boras endorsed MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s proposal to expand the postseason from 10 teams to 14 — “The economics would say there’s more TV revenues for more playoffs. The question is, where do those revenues go and how are they used?” — but the superagent is against
management’s proposal of a $100 million payroll floor.
“They give you the rowboat of the minimum,” Boras said, “but the tidal wave of the ceiling on the maximum just drowns the whole concept.”