Scott Boras tossed three new letters into the alphabet soup of baseball abbreviations. We learned long ago about ERA and RBI. The statistically inclined favored OBP and OPS.
As summer turned to fall, Boras introduced us to IPN. On Wednesday, we learned its real meaning: Individual Player Negotiating. Alex Rodriguez is an IPN player indeed.
It was Schadenfreude Day in baseball, with a startling number of folks on the players' side and the owners' side united in toasting what appears to be the public humiliation of the most powerful agent in the game. Think about it: The best player in baseball issues a statement announcing he has circumvented his agent so he could rejoin the team he never wanted to leave.
"I think there are a lot of people in this business having various degrees of glee over this," said a longtime baseball power broker, "whether they are general managers, people in the commissioner's office, people in the media or some competing agents."
Boras led Rodriguez in walking away from the richest contract in baseball history, inventing IPN to portray Rodriguez as a unique player with iconic value, performance value and network television value. Rodriguez walked himself back to the New York Yankees.
"It became clear to me," he said in his statement, "that I needed to make an attempt to engage the Yankees. . . . I wanted the opportunity to share my thoughts directly with Yankees' ownership. . . . I reached out to the Yankees through mutual friends."
If Boras had made that first call, the Yankees would not have listened. They had made an attempt to engage Rodriguez. They had wanted the opportunity to share their thoughts directly with Rodriguez. They had reached out through Boras, his representative.
Boras had put a price on that engagement, that opportunity: $350 million, over 10 years.
"What happened here was that his bravado got the better of him," said Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist, an occasional consultant to the players' union.
"Instead of pushing the envelope, he jumped zip codes. That was out of all sense of proportion, out of the grasp of the reality of the underlying economics."
Maybe not at first glance. In each of the final two seasons under his old contract, Rodriguez would have made $32 million. If the commissioner brags that baseball generates a record $6 billion in revenue, and if Rodriguez is on the verge of his third most valuable player award in five years, why should he take a pay cut?
