Scott Boras

Stop it, both of you. Put down those egos. Unclench that pride. Get up off the arrogance. Stop it, now, or both of you will lose, and the price of this defeat will be far higher than anything being negotiated. After a winter of slings and arrows, one thing has become outrageously unfortunate. The biggest obstacles to Manny Ramirez's being a Dodger are the two guys trying to make him a Dodger.

The adjective du jour is "extraordinary." Scott Boras uses a thesaurus better than anyone in baseball. He has advertised players as special, as premium, as iconic. For Stephen Strasburg, and for Boras' mission to get him paid as if he were a free agent rather than a draft pick, baseball's most powerful agent has chosen "extraordinary." As in: "The equation of how an extraordinary talent fits in really has little or nothing to do with the other aspects of the draft."