[新聞] 來篇短的Scott Boras
剛的文章落落長，來篇短的吧！
美國Bussiness Week針對運動界最有影響力的前100名人士作一系列的報導，
除了Moneyball的Michael Lewis及Billy Beane外，
也有我們熟悉的A-Rod(排28)及他那令人又愛又恨的經紀人Boras.
大家有空看看吧！文章右邊有一系列報導的連結。
文章來源：http://tinyurl.com/34925a
Scott Boras
The über-agent uses data-mining to attract baseball talent
by Matthew Cole
Conventional wisdom suggests it's lonely at the top. But if so, Scott D.
Boras doesn't seem to mind. Boras, 54, is the most successful agent in
baseball, and possibly the most powerful figure in the game. Sports agents
have long been characterized as sleazy moneymen, willing to do anything to
get a higher price for their client. Boras is no exception. He has been
called the Most Hated Man, and the Ruin of the American Pastime. "When you
negotiate between millionaires and billionaires," Boras has said, "it's hard
to be a sympathetic figure."
Nonetheless, Boras' pioneering use of game statistics to help his clients
train and perform better has helped him negotiate $3 billion in player
contracts over the past 30 years, including $252 million over 10 years for
Alex Rodriguez, the largest deal ever. As such, he is a trendsetter. Jeff
Moorad, a former agent, and now an executive vice-president with the Arizona
Diamondbacks, says Boras is at the industry's vanguard. "Scott has taken the
lead in the current thinking" of sports training.
Boras grew up the son of a farmer south of Sacramento, Calif., and devoted to
baseball. During his five-year career in the minor leagues, Boras studied the
business of pharmaceuticals at the University of the Pacific, where he
learned how to market new drugs and products by setting a speculative value—
a skill perfectly suited for selling young baseball players who have never
played in the big leagues. He followed that up with a law degree but quickly
ended up back in baseball, negotiating minor league contracts for his former
teammates. By 1980, he had decided his calling was as a baseball agent.
What differentiates Boras from his peers and lends him his power is how he
uses stats. Baseball is a game of history and numbers. Boras' approach has
been to identify and organize data—stats—in a way that can explain his
players' performance or help them study their success and failures on the
field.
In the early 1990s Boras brought in a NASA computer scientist and a Harvard
economics major to put together a database with stats from 1871 to the
present day. The system, which cost millions of dollars to build, keeps score
of every pitch and at-bat in the major leagues in real time. The Boras Corp.
headquarters in Newport Beach, Calif., resembles a Wall Street trading firm:
rows and rows of desks filled with flat-screen panels displaying tickers of
up-to-the-minute data of their client's performance.
Since Boras can't guarantee his players will perform, he has put in place
several elements to make sure they have everything they need to do so. In
2003, he opened a training institute with a former major league trainer to
give his young clients a facility and training program dedicated to their
individual talents and positions. He was the first in his industry to take
athletic training away from baseball teams—to much initial grumbling from
the coaches—supplanting them as the authority on how to condition and take
care of themselves. Boras says the idea is to make sure his clients have all
the tools to fulfill the expectations of their contract. "You keep great
players in the game longer, you increase the level of play, and thereby
increase the revenues because the fans will be more interested in seeing
great players play."
Come November, Boras is poised to break his record with a new $300 million
contract for Rodriguez, for which his take is 5%. And his future looks
bullish. After all, baseball is the only major sport without a salary cap.
Plus, the sport is breaking attendance records and MLB's annual revenue—
roughly $6 billion this year—continues to grow at a double-digit pace. The
upshot: Boras can ask for ever-increasing salaries for his clients. That's
power.
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