A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (9 page)

Boras liked to remind his clients that, unlike his rival agents who’d been born in offi ce swivel chairs, he too had played professional baseball. He used this line on his résumé to goad the competitive egos of his clients. For him, negotiations were about winning, hardball style. Other agents brokered conciliatory contracts to keep their clients in the good graces of management. Boras bragged that he broke teams’ backs. “My identity should reside in my players’

wallets,” he said. Some organizations had been so stung by Boras that they steered clear of draft picks represented by him.

“We were familiar with Scott Boras,” Jongewaard says. “But we really felt Alex was worth whatever we had to go through.”

Boras was directing Alex’s campaign against the Mariners, but Lourdes’s signature was on the endless stream of faxed contract negotiations between her son and the Mariners. It was Boras who, through Lourdes, set the early parameters for Alex’s contract demands: $2.5 million over three years; a guaranteed quick ascent through the farm system; a major-league contract. And a key requirement: while negotiating, no one from the Mariners was to contact Alex personally. Ever. For any reason.

This was a classic Boras ploy. He knew that detachment removed emotion from the process. This meant avoiding face-to- face meetings, where eyes could be studied, souls could be searched, minds could be read, the price could be whittled down, in this case by Alex’s desire to please. Boras would have none of it. “Scott tries
to divide you away from the client,” Jongewaard says. “He wants control from the client and to portray us as really bad guys. And that way, any personal ties are eliminated. There’s nothing personal about it anymore.”

Alex and his family took these rules of separation seriously.

The Mariners called Alex’s home 50 to 60 times in the fi rst fi ve days after the draft, but not one call was returned. A week later, Jongewaard and team representatives from the Mariners fl ew to Miami and knocked on Alex’s front door. They were not greeted warmly, but they were allowed to step inside, where they presented their opening offer: $1 million over three years. They said that was about $20,000 more than what the college All-American Jef-frey Hammonds had signed for a year earlier as the fourth pick of Baltimore.

Lourdes cut Jongewaard off before he could explain more about the offer, which was a major-league deal, as the family had requested, and included the September call-up to the majors they had demanded. Lourdes put her hand up as if to stop traffi c. “It was kind of like ‘Get out, you’re wasting our time,’ ” Jongewaard recalls. “We said, ‘This is a great offer that nobody else has ever had.’ But Scott wanted to be a pioneer with this guy.”

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The tractor bumping along the furrowed fi elds of the farm in California’s fertile Central Valley was equipped with a single amenity for the teenager behind the wheel: a radio. On most days, Scott Boras had it tuned to KSFO, dialing in the crackle of a San Francisco Giants game as he worked among the dairy cattle grazing on land with soil rich enough to grow alfalfa.

He was reared in a family of farmers just south of Sacramento and could have easily left that life by virtue of his academic achieve-ments, not to mention his skills as a high school center fi elder. The
Ivy League schools wanted him after his senior season in 1970, but Boras took a scholarship to play for the University of the Pacifi c, located outside San Francisco. He had a disciplined eye at the plate and a knack for blistering liners into the gaps. He was a student of baseball— of its in-game nuances and strategic odds— but his mind demanded more fodder than the calculation of RBIs and ERAs. He was into Hg and Zn, too, applying his curiosity about life toward a major in chemistry.

He was the lone ballplayer in his Calculus III class, and in a nod to the demands of his baseball schedule, the faculty at Pacifi c allowed him to take lab exams privately from 9 p.m. to midnight.

“I was the fi rst athlete to ever have, like, a premed type situation [there],” Boras once told
The New Yorker
. By his sophomore year, in concurrence with his undergraduate coursework, he had begun pursuing a degree in industrial pharmacology.

He signed with the St. Louis Cardinals as a free agent in 1974

and got an $8,000 bonus. “You think it’s the greatest privilege in the world, because now you don’t have to go work on the farm anymore,” he said about signing a professional baseball contract.

“You get that check the fi rst week, and you can’t believe anyone’s paying you to play.”

After surviving a round of spring training cuts one year, Boras saw 50 of the vanquished gathered in the parking lot, left with nothing in their pockets but the dregs of their per diem. They were just kids, many with barely a high school diploma, and suddenly it was over. “It was stunning to me,” Boras said. “I saw number one draft picks who had rusted-out vans. There were wives crying and players with kids. I saw the other side out there, the ending of careers. I mean, in college baseball, you had cuts, but you still stayed around the school. This was, for these guys, just the end of the road.”

He quickly came to see the business of baseball as a brutal model of social inequity in the marketplace.

He still loved the game, of course. Although he often hid his
physics texts beneath men’s magazines as he worked on his degrees during his downtime, Boras played until his knees betrayed him. At age 26, after a four-year stint in the minor leagues, he left the game to return to school. He fi nished up a PharmD in industrial phar-maceuticals, and briefl y, before he went to law school, he worked as a pharmacist in a Sacramento hospital.

“Scott was an excellent pharmacist, and he and I would frequently discuss med management and drug interactions of patients going into surgery,” says Burton Goldstein, an anesthesiologist who worked with Boras. “We would engage in conversations, and I really enjoyed talking to him about that because he was a very knowledgeable pharmacist. He really knew his drugs.”

Boras went off to law school. After passing the bar, he spent fi ve years defending drug companies against product liability claims, although that seemed paradoxical, given the zeal for class warfare stoked by his stint in the minors.

He soothed his social conscience by moonlighting for ballplayers in need of legal advice. He struck his fi rst major score when an old minor-league teammate, reliever Bill Caudill, hired him to handle his contract negotiations with the Toronto Blue Jays in 1985. Eight minutes before a scheduled salary arbitration hearing, the unruffl ed Boras, who neither cursed nor yelled to make his long-winded points with management, landed Caudill a fi ve-year, $7.5 million contract.

A note about the signing landed Boras’s name in
Sports Illustrated
. When his Chicago law fi rm forced him to choose between defending corporate America and representing ballplayers, Boras sided with his inner vigilante. “I enjoyed working for people instead of big companies,” he said. “It’s like you’re working for David against Goliath.”

He enjoyed making masters of the universe squirm. In this respect, Boras was the soul mate of Gene Orza, the associate general counsel for the Major League Baseball Players Association. Orza
was an almost maniacal civil libertarian who defended players even when they seemed indefensible. It didn’t matter how many times pitcher Steve Howe was cited for drug and alcohol abuse— which led to seven suspensions during a career that spanned from 1980

to 1996— Orza was unfl inching in his fi ght to keep the troubled player in baseball. Like Boras, Orza loved a good war. Like Orza, Boras adored the game.

It was the owners neither man had use for. When Boras chose to get back into baseball, he decided to get back at baseball. “It’s that chip on his shoulder that he still wants everyone in baseball to pay for,” says one major-league general manager. “His client becomes secondary to his anger against the baseball gods. It’s always about Scott.”

And the contract is his scorecard.

Alex protected himself against a long summer of negotiations by buying an insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London that would cover him if he suffered a career-ending injury. In June, he was working out for Team USA in Tennessee when Fernando Arguelles, the Seattle scout who had known Alex for two years, started talking with other baseball offi cials on the practice fi eld. Alex walked up and joined the conversation. Arguelles did not mention a word about Alex’s contract, but word fi ltered back to Boras that he had spoken to his client.

On June 22, Alex unleashed a rant against the Mariners organization that had been dictated by Boras. “They’re low class,” Alex told reporters. “They disrespected my mom. We told them not to contact us in any way, and they contacted me. Right now, I’m very upset with them. I’m 17, and they’re going beyond the limits. I’m in no need of money. And it’s not that the minor-league life is so great, anyway.”

Boras liked to turn his clients against a team even if it meant
that he had to cook up the illusion of hostility. “Scott wanted to be the guy on the white horse,” Jongewaard says. Boras accused the Mariners of stalking Alex and harassing the teen everywhere he went.

“It wasn’t true,” Jongewaard adds. “But Scott wanted Alex and his family to think that. It was very, very aggressive on Scott’s part.”

The timing of Alex’s “low class” riff was also a diversion from the other issue surrounding the top draft pick, who, with every passing day of stalled negotiations, was being characterized in the press as a diva.

Team USA had no use for Boras’s games. He had advised Alex to refuse to sign over his rights to Team USA’s trading card company, Topps. “That would have cost me at least $500,000 in lost income with another card company,” Alex later wrote. “I told team offi cials I couldn’t agree to the card deal. I got cut [from Team USA].”

It was an embarrassment for Alex. It was business as usual for Boras.

As the summer ground on, though, Alex started to waver.

Lourdes couldn’t sleep. She had heard all about draft disappoint-ments and busts. “C’mon, your mother is working as a waitress,”

Arguelles told Alex in August. “How can you turn down a million dollars when your mom is struggling and has worked her tail off to put food on the table?”

How could he? Alex wondered that himself. He knew nothing was guaranteed.

In 1966, the Mets had picked catcher Steve Chilcott as number one, but he had never played a major-league game. Back injuries had plagued Jeff King, the draft’s top pick in 1986. In 1991, the Yankees had selected the hard-throwing lefty Brien Taylor as number one, but he had never pitched in the big leagues. Taylor could throw 90 miles per hour before he was 14 and was the surest thing anyone had ever seen. In December 1993, in a trailer-park brawl, Taylor took a swing at a man and missed everything except
the side of a car. Just like that, it was over for Taylor. The last anyone heard, he was laying bricks.

“Everybody said, ‘Oh, he’s going to make it, he’s going to make it,’ but only two percent make it,” says Joe Arriola, who advised the Rodriguez family. “And there’ve been people with as much talent as Alex that have not made it, you know? So as a mother you have to be worried.”

This game of chicken involving Alex made Lourdes very nervous. What if the Mariners called his bluff? What if Alex had to start taking classes at Miami? She’d lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering if Boras wasn’t going overboard. Despite her fears, she hid her nerves from the Mariners, playing the bad cop on those faxed offers from Seattle.

“She was programmed,” Jongewaard says. “If we would’ve said ten million dollars, she would’ve said, ‘I’m insulted; that’s not enough money for my son.’ Scott once told me, ‘You never know what you’ll do until the eleventh hour. When you might fi nd people afraid of losing the guy, what they’ll come up with it.’ So I fi gured it would take all summer to sign Alex.”

By August, the faxes sent to the Mariners by Lourdes— as the standin for Boras— had grown terser. On August 4, less than a month before Alex was to begin classes at Miami, the Mariners received a faxed letter that laid out Alex’s drop-dead demand: $2.5

million over three years.

On Mariners letterhead, in a fax dated August 16, 1993, Mariners team president Chuck Armstrong, wrote:
Dear Ms. Navarro:

Your August 4 letter asks me to respond “ honestly”

to your proposal, which you have now characterized as a
“fi nal” and “non-negotiable” position.
I had thought that we responded to this proposal in
our prior letters, and in putting forward the Club’s offer
to Alex. So that you and Alex will know exactly where the
Mariners stand, let me try to be more clear and direct:
1. We remain interested as ever in Alex and are
committed to offering him a competitive contract.

2. We believe our previous offer to Alex was highly
competitive for all of the reasons stated in my July 26

letter. It remains the best offer made to anyone in the
past two years.

Again, we are desirous of sitting down with you, your
family and advisers, to discuss these issues and to see common
ground. I share your sense of frustration with our exchange
of letters. Certainly, Alex’s professional future is important
enough to justify a face-to- face discussion, before we think
about pursuing other alternatives. In this regard, we invite
you to Seattle. We think you will fi nd a visit to Seattle to be
both interesting and worthwhile. You are welcome anytime.

We have an exciting homestand coming up with Toronto
beginning Thursday, August 26 which should be a lot of
fun. Just let me know when you would like to come.

I hope Alex is recovering well from his recent injury.

If we can help in any way with his medical arrangements,
please call.

Very truly yours,