Chicken-Little Boras

The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!  So says Chicken Little, aka super-agent Scott Boras.  “We have a non-competitive cancer that’s ruining the fabric of this sport” of baseball, Boras is quoted as saying by USA Today’s (very sympathetic, by the way) Bob Nightengale.  Boras has also said recently that so many teams going into rebuild mode is bad for both fans and players, neither of whom likes it.  Well, I’d want to see the polling data on that.

The real problem for Boras is that teams tearing it all down trade away their best players, and after teams have swung deals for a Giancarlo Stanton or Dee Gordon, they won’t want to overspend on a client of Boras.  Oh, boo-hoo.

Boras wants to set up a cockamamie bonus system to encourage winning (so that teams with 82 and 83 wins will delude themselves into thinking they’re one or two free agents away from going to the World Series); the more a team wins, the more it will be allowed to spend on draft bonuses.  How this makes baseball more competitive is beyond me.

Right now, there’s something like 130 free agents out there.  If they can’t get big deals, they’ll have to settle for one-year contracts, which will in turn depress the free-agent market next year when the likes of Manny Machado and Boras-client Bryce Harper become available.  Gosh, I wonder if Boras will steer Harper away from the Cubs or the Yankees in the name of competitive balance.  I wonder what kind of song and dance Boras would do if both players signed with the same team.

What this fan doesn’t like about rebuilds is that ticket prices don’t go down commensurate with the loss of talent.  I also don’t like that baseball owners—and players, for that matter—have foisted the cost of ballparks onto taxpayers.  I also don’t like income tax rates that leave more money for clueless athletes to fool around with, as in the late Jose Fernandez and Roy Halladay.  Lastly, I don’t like a capital gains’ tax rate that allows a clueless owner like the Marlins’ Jeffrey Loria to cash out bigtime when he sells a team.

I happen to think that owners paying their own mortgages is a very good thing, Scott.  It may not translate into higher player salaries, but it will make owners work to keep their ballparks filled.  What do you think, Chicken Little?