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Ever since "Jerry Maguire," the world of the sports agent has seemed glamorous and exciting to outsiders like me. When you're an agent, you get to hang out with star athletes and negotiate big deals. And when the day is done, you get to sit home with Renee Zellwegger and count the money. Just one big deal for your client and you can clear millions for yourself, your blond wife and your bespectacled stepson.
Sure,
you had to put up with some idiosyncrasies ("Show me the money, Jerry!"),
and you had to deal with backstabbing competitors. But even those facts
just seemed to heighten the thrill.
However, after reading Jerry Crasnick's new book, "License to Deal: A Season on the Run with a Maverick Sports Agent," and learning about that world from the inside, I now have zero desire to become a sports agent. But I certainly enjoyed reading about it. "License to Deal" is a fascinating look at a part of baseball that, surprisingly, gets very little attention.
Crasnick, a writer for ESPN.com, follows the trials and travails of two relative newcomers to the agenting business: Matt Sosnick and his partner, Paul Cobbe. Their prize client is Florida's pitching sensation Dontrelle Willis. Willis is, in fact, their only star. The rest of their clients are recent high school and college draftees, youngsters still in the minors, and fringe major leaguers who haven't hit the big time.
The startup nature of their business puts Sosnick and Cobbe in the unenviable position of continuously scrambling to attract new clients while protecting their stable from entreaties from Scott Boras and the other big-timers to change agents. Or as Crasnick describes him, "Matt Sosnick… is known as the weird, reclusive Californian who's fighting to keep his lunch money in a schoolyard filled with bullies."
In "License to Deal," you learn a lot about what might be called agenting from the ground up. In fact, I wasn't aware at all about how the system works until reading this book. Sosnick and Cobbe - and baseball agents generally - scour the country like scouts to identify high schoolers and college players likely to get drafted by major league teams. They convince the players and their families to choose them as unofficial (and unpaid) "advisers" prior to the draft in order to preserve the players' college eligibility if they don't sign with the club. After the draft, the agents will negotiate the best deals for the players, and if the players sign, the agents will earn between zero and five percent of the contract total.
In stark contrast to Boras, who is known to encourage his players to hold out for more money, Sosnick says he wants only to get a fair deal for his clients without screwing the clubs. At one point, Crasnick describes a brief negotiation between Sosnick and Yankees vice president Mark Newman over 2004 draftee Jeff Marquez. Sosnick offers Marquez to the Yankees for the same bonus as the bonus given the previous year to the 41st draft pick, $800,000. Quick haggling results in a firm deal of only $790,000, but Sosnick feels justified in the negotiation:
"Later, Matt explains that the actual contract negotiation is a "zero thing," the most meaningless part of the process. What counts is product placement. By working the phones and networking with scouting directors and talent evaluators, Matt has determined that the Dodgers and Yankees are the only two teams with serious interest in Jeff Marquez. If he pushes too hard and New York passes at 41 and 42, there's a chance that Marquez could slip to Los Angeles in the 58th spot. TheDodgers later select Louisiana high school pitcher Blake Johnson with that pick and give him $600,000. So by negotiating reasonably and quickly, Matt appears to have made Jeff Marquez and his family an additional $190,000 at the very least. If Matt shortchanged the 41st slot a few thousand bucks, he considers that a small price to pay."
I was surprised to learn that sometimes the agents will have to offer their service at no charge simply to compete against other agents. How do they make money? First, they try to sign marketing deals with shoe or baseball card companies, for which the agents are paid about 15% of the deal. And second, they have to hope their players will eventually make the majors, where the real money lies, and - this is the important part - that they'll stick with the same agents when they do.
That's the biggest challenge to surviving as an agent. Several times in "License to Deal," Sosnick and Cobbe lose clients to bigger firms like the Scott Boras Company and Beverly Hills Sports Council, just as the players are about to hit the big time. Travis Hafner is one such example. He had been a Sosnick-Cobbe client since Class A ball, but in winter 2002, just after Hafner was traded to the Indians with the expectation he would compete for a starting job, he began interviewing other firms, including superagent Jeff Moorad's agency - not coincidentally, the agent of Hafner's fellow North Dakotan, Darin Erstad. Eventually, Hafner decided to fire Sosnick-Cobbe, which came as a huge blow to Cobbe, who felt he had been close to Hafner. Writes Crasnick, "[Paul] had nightmares about the whole episode, bolting upright in bed with his eyes wide open and droplets of sweat dotting his forehead, like some character in a cheap TV melodrama. In 5 years in the business, no setback hit him harder or forced him to spend more time reassessing or self-flagellating."
Of course, it's not just Sosnick and Cobbe who lose clients; the big fish continually steal from little fish - and from each other. Sometimes, complaints are filed with the Players' Union, but usually nothing comes of it. Client theft is and will remain a big problem in the business. I'm sure Crasnick flirted with the possibility of calling his book "License to Steal."
Sosnick and, to a slightly lesser extent, Cobbe receive most of the ink in "License to Deal," but Crasnick also devotes an entire chapter to Boras. I'm sure a compelling book could be written about Boras, too. Boras is well known in baseball circles for negotiating Alex Rodriguez's $250 million contract with the Texas Rangers a few years ago, not to mention huge deals for Kevin Brown, Darren Dreifort and others. He's as hated in baseball circles as any agent, and among a certain chicken-little segment of the fan population, he probably ranks with Players' Union chief Donald Fehr and Commissioner Bud Selig as the people most responsible for ruining baseball. (Such hyperbole is misguided, of course. Boras, Fehr, and even Selig are simply representing their interests to the best of their abilities. And as much as I would wish they would put the fans' interests higher than their own, such hope is just not realistic.)
"License to Deal" is at its strongest when describing the inside interactions between players and agents, and between agents and scouts or front office executives. Sosnick and Cobbe pride themselves on developing close relationships with their players. In fact, several of them even slept in their homes for extended periods. And three of them, including Willis, had the company logo tattooed on their arms in a show of exuberant loyalty. Why? Willis explains, "This guy has done a good job for me thus far. I've been with Matt since I signed out of high school, so I don't want to feel like I'm switching now just because I'm having success. We've had the same relationship since I was in Rookie Ball. That goes a long way."
Crasnick has a nose for good stories, and he usually gets to the bottom of the controversies he describes - or at least as close to the bottom as the principals will let him. He never mentions himself by name in the narrative, however, and I wish he had. As a reader, I'm often as interested in how the story was obtained as I am in the story itself, and there were times during "License to Deal" that I wasn't sure, for example, whether Crasnick was relying on his own interviews or on interviews published in "Baseball America" or elsewhere. I tend to believe that at least 90% of the reporting was indeed Crasnick's. But I also think a few well-placed phrases like "I discovered that" and "Boras told me" would have strengthened the credibility of the narrative while still keeping the focus on the story. Perhaps most readers won't care about this, but, as an admirer of non-fiction writers like Michael Lewis ("Moneyball") and Malcolm Gladwell ("Blink"), who do put themselves into their narratives, I do care.
Still, "License to Deal" succeeds on most every level, and it delivers everything I look for in a new baseball book: It presents interesting characters. It illuminates a part of the game that doesn't get a lot of attention. And it uncovers and recounts scores of fascinating stories. It belongs on the bookshelves of any fan seeking a broader understanding of the forces that are shaping baseball in the 21st century.