With Pay Soaring For MLB’s Elite, The Sport’s Biggest Agent Is Eyeing Team Owners For More

If you’re still wondering why baseball was almost canceled this year, look no further than Friday’s season opener between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Oakland Athletics. On one side, the Phillies will roll out a roster that is set to cost billionaire John Middleton and his co-owners more than $215 million this year. On the other, the A’s have an opening-day payroll lagging at just $32 million.

It’s the kind of matchup that gets under the skin of baseball’s most powerful agent, Scott Boras, whose two Philly clients—sluggers Bryce Harper and Nick Castellanos—together will make about $15 million more this year than the entire A’s team.

Boras, who is so dominant in the sport that he no longer speaks of haggling for pay scale but of “putting a tone on the market” for certain positions, has been cleaning up as of late. The Boras Corporation represents seven of baseball’s ten highest-paid players—Max Scherzer, Gerrit Cole, Corey Seager, Anthony Rendon, Stephen Strasburg and Carlos Correa, in addition to Harper—and during this truncated off-season negotiated $1.3 billion in new contracts, a record for a single agency.

With the market all but cornered on MLB’s elite, the 69-year-old Boras is now looking to expand the number of buyers willing to bid for his players’ services, arguing that the kind of pay disparity that separates the A’s from the Phillies is not only bad for business but also bad for baseball. If billionaires like A’s owner John Fisher were more willing to aggressively pursue the best players, the result would be not only bigger contracts—and bigger commissions—but more excitement.

“We want every fan to go to the ballpark saying my team benefits from them winning every day,” Boras says. “That system is something that has to be put in place so that we can guarantee the fans that when they root for their teams.”

Major League Baseball and its players’ union ended a three-month lockout and saved the full 162-game season with an 11th-hour deal for a new collective bargaining agreement last month, but Boras believes the league missed an opportunity to prevent stingy owners from coasting on its revenue-sharing system, which allows them to benefit financially even when their on-field product is subpar. He surely has the backing of players on that count. For one thing, an expanded pool of bidders could give a much-needed boost to players in baseball’s middle class, who have been hit hard in recent years as the average salary has stagnated, with teams largely splitting their resources between superstars and young, cheap players.

Players themselves have gone public with their complaints about baseball’s lopsided economics with increasing frequency over the past year.

“Embarrassed for your fan base…be better,” San Francisco Giants outfielder Joc Pederson tweeted on March 23, along with a table of the league’s highest and lowest payroll totals. The CBA had been signed less than two weeks prior. “If you can’t, sell ur team to somebody that wants to show the fan base and baseball they’re at least trying to compete. Sorry unacceptable.”

The argument resonates at a time of soaring team valuations, which hit a record average of $2.07 billion this year even though the 30 franchises collectively lost $1.14 billion over the past two seasons combined because of the pandemic.

“It’s the billionaire class,” Boras says, arguing with his typical bombast that even the owners of small-market teams have no excuse not to invest in their clubs. “It’s no longer a class of haves and have-nots.”

To be fair to the owners, they are still digging out from Covid-19. For instance, the Phillies, MLB’s eighth-most-valuable team at $2.3 billion, had an operating loss of $17 million last year, according to Forbes estimates, and the 30 teams have had to take on more than $2 billion of debt and inject about $1.5 billion of equity over the past two years. And there are real economic factors underlying the disparity between clubs and their spending. In 2019, the last season before the pandemic, the Phillies posted revenue of $392 million, 74% higher than the Athletics’ $225 million.

Competitive balance isn’t the most pressing issue for players lower down the pay spectrum anyway. That would be baseball’s service-time system, which requires players to spend a certain amount of time on an active major league roster and then go through salary arbitration before finally hitting free agency. The system ensures players remain off the free market for years, under team control and on favorable terms, sometimes through their primes. While the new collective bargaining agreement created a bonus pool for pre-arbitration players and raised the minimum salary, it didn’t overhaul that core system, and owners have shown little willingness to engage on the issue.

Still, Boras is hopeful that player salaries are heading in the right direction. He points to his client Correa, who unexpectedly landed on the Minnesota Twins last month, as an example of how everyone can win when owners cut bigger checks. The 27-year-old star shortstop, who hired Boras during the lockout, landed a three-year, $105 million deal. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that 100,000 tickets were then sold in one day, a nice bump in local revenue that comes on top of the more than $2 billion in national media revenue shared by the 30 teams.

“We need a restructuring of the rules. I think the players certainly voiced that in their CBA negotiations,” Boras says. “And while we took small steps, I hope as Neil Armstrong said, maybe in the next CBA, maybe we’ll take one giant leap for MLB better integrity.”