A-Reck -- The Hardball Times

I’ve never made any secret about the disdain I feel for Bud Selig and Scott Boras; I feel both are negative influences on the game and baseball will be far better off once they’re out of the picture. Now if we could only do something about Jeffrey Loria and David Samson. But I digress. Anyway, the more I think about it, the more I think Scott Boras has been a very destructive influence on Alex Rodriguez. Oh sure, he’s helped him make a ton of money but I think it’s safe to say that his skills would have made him a wealthy man regardless of who represented him as an agent. Nevertheless, I do think that absent Boras, Rodriguez might be a better player and certainly he would be better liked. It goes far beyond 252, although it did play a factor. His free agency at the end of the 2000 season was a definite turning point for A-Rod insofar as being both a baseball player and an icon. Of note, when he was with the Seattle Mariners, it was Ken Griffey Jr. and not Rodriguez that was king in the clubhouse. A-Rod enjoyed a single season as “top dog” (although he would have had to share that status with Edgar Martinez) and after he left as a free agent there weren’t all the stories about the special privileges he enjoyed there as there were when Junior was dealt to the Cincinnati Reds. The slugging shortstop assumed a leadership role on the 2000 Mariners, and it appears that he wasn’t given the type of perks and privileges that would cause other players to resent him in the Pacific Northwest. However, when he became a free agent, Boras made it known that a team would have to move heaven and earth to land him—it was entirely about what a club could do for Alex Rodriguez; as Boras put it, it was about ‘their desire to bring A-Rod to them.’ Allegedly he demanded a long list of perks from the New York Mets, and even though Boras denied asking for such things, he did get a lot of them out of the Texas Rangers. Did these perks originate in the mind of Boras or...