The Free Agent game

Agents: you either love them (if you’re a player) or you hate them (basically everyone else).  Ask most sports fans to describe a typical agent and they will provide a caricature of a shameless, greedy shyster who gets inside the player’s head and makes him move to a club they don’t really want to go to.  This is particularly the case in football where a new team means a lucrative new contract, on improved financial terms, and a ten per cent cut of the sizeable transfer fee.  The players are merely the pawns in the agent’s money-making game.

As with any caricature, this combines elements of truth with some unfair fantasy. 

The agent’s job is to get their client the best deal they can, which sets them up against the rest of the baseball world. 

The team wants to sign the player for the lowest price possible, so an agent driving a hard bargain is a real inconvenience to them.  Meanwhile fans working all the hours in the day to make an adequate living will look at a guy whose ‘job’ involves playing a sport and think that they are already lucky enough without seeking huge sums of money.

The situation is guaranteed to lead to a conflict that casts the agent as the bad guy.  Sometimes that’s fair and sometimes it isn’t.  The sports agent profession is no different to any other business.  There are decent agents whose only ‘crime’ is to be good at their job and there are unscrupulous agents who deserve all the venom they get.  With the emotion involved, working out from the outside who fits into which category is very difficult.

This week’s public spat between the Braves and Rafael Furcal’s agents Paul Kinzer and Arn Tellem is the latest example of this.

The Braves are mad at the way in which they believe a deal to bring Furcal back to Atlanta had been agreed and then broken.  Their president Jon Schuerholz launched a scathing attack on the agents, describing their actions as “disgusting and unprofessional”, adding: “having been in this business for 40-some years, I’ve never seen anybody treated like that”. 

Kinzer and Tellem have mounted a firm rebuttal of the Braves’ claims, stating that a deal had never been formally agreed and that they had done nothing wrong in subsequently going to the Dodgers and signing a contract with them. 

So, who do we believe?  Both sides have tried to win the public battle through the press and this is where it gets complicated.  There is a constant game going on between teams and agents that reporters are more than willing to play a part in because it makes for great copy. 

The Braves have been spurned again (first in the trade talks for Peavy, then being gazumped by the Yankees for Burnett, before Furcal slipped from their grasp) and it’s beginning to look like their off-season plan is unravelling.  Playing the ‘devious agent’ card through the press could just be a good way to placate Braves fans and to shift the blame for the Furcal deal breaking down.  On the other hand, their comments may be a product of justifiable anger.

What made the Furcal ‘now you see him, now you don’t’ saga all the more galling for the Braves is that the phantom agreement was being reported by the press as a done deal.  Maybe Kinzer did lead GM Frank Wren to believe that an agreement had been reached, but if so it seems like someone within the Braves organization gave a nod and a wink to a reporter or two before anything had actually been signed. 

Information leaks are a part of sporting life, not least because it can serve both teams and agents well to deliberately plant stories in the press, whether they are true or not. 

The Red Sox Nation was placed on red alert earlier in the week when it was reported that members of the Boston Front Office were in talks with Mark Teixeira.  News of ‘talks’ quickly were interpreted as meaning that Tex was about to sign.  Was this encouraged by the Red Sox in an attempt to put pressure on Teixeira and his agent Scott Boras to agree to a deal?  Maybe Boras was trying to smoke out the other potential suitors, hoping that the news would cause one of them to race to the phone and up their offer?  Or was it simply reporters getting ahead of themselves? 

The Red Sox’s principal owner John Henry ultimately told reporters that they are “not going to be a factor” in the Teixeira sweepstakes, but that might not prove to be true.  If Boras was making extravagant claims about other offers on the table, this move by Henry could be designed to see if they are genuine.  If Boras was hoping to use the Red Sox’s interest to drive up the Angels’ offer, that plan has now taken a hit and could result in a deal more to the Red Sox’s suiting. 

This is all a game, albeit one involving considerable sums of money.  The fact that we don’t know who or what to believe is part of the fun for onlooking fans.  We can’t say for sure what happened between the Braves and Furcal’s agents, just as we don’t currently know if Henry’s comments were a ploy or a statement of fact.

What we do know is that however things turn out on the Hot Stove, the agents will be the ones who get the flak from one direction or another.  And they’ll also be the ones who end up with greatly increased bank accounts.