Top Sports Agents

Scott Boras is credited with allowing players to have more control over their salary when they are first drafted in the amateur draft. Boras told one of his first clients, the 1983 draft's top pick Tim Belcher, to hold out for a larger signing bonus. The Minnesota Twins offered Belcher $100,000, the same amount as the previous year's top selection, Shawon Dunston, and not much higher than the 1965 draft's top choice, Rick Monday. Instead, Scott Boras wanted Belcher to receive a bonus of $150,000. This essentially was what caused signing bonuses for amateur baseball players to escalate; high draft picks in the late 1990s and early 2000s routinely receive bonuses of several million dollars. Several Scott Boras Corp clients were prominent in the 1996 draft. Boras found a loophole that granted free agency to four top first-round picks: Matt White, Travis Lee, John Patterson, and Bobby Seay. He was able to get White a $10.1 million deal from the Tampa Bay Devil Rays; White has never reached the major leagues, however. Seay, who signed with the Devil Rays for $3 million, was a reliever with Tampa Bay for four seasons and is now with the Colorado Rockies. Lee, a star with Team USA in the 1996 Summer Olympics, has been a solid backup for several teams, while Patterson is now a middle-of-the-rotation starter for the Washington Nationals. J.D. Drew was another Boras client whose original team could not sign him. Scott Boras's demand was an $11 million contract from the Philadelphia Phillies; the Phillies' offer was $3 million. Drew ended up having to hold out, playing the rest of the season in the independent Northern League. Drew re-entered the draft the following season and signed with the St. Louis Cardinals for $8 million. J.D. Drew's brother, Stephen Drew, and Jered Weaver (the brother of pitcher Jeff Weaver) were two Scott Boras Corp clients drafted in 2004 who held out almost long enough to re-enter the draft in 2005. Both ended up signing without having to reenter the draft, but neither could play professional baseball during the year that they were drafted due to their holdouts. Boras started his career as an agent by representing his former minor league teammates just as they were about to enter the major leagues. Boras's first multi-million dollar contract, a five-year, $7.5 million deal with the Toronto Blue Jays, was for his former teammate Bill Caudill; Caudill had to retire three years into the deal, at the age of 31, due to arthritic shoulders. Today, Scott Boras runs the Scott Boras Corporation, where he employs former major leaguers as scouts in Asia and Latin America. He has continued to negotiate deals for many of Major League Baseball's high-profile players in recent years, including Barry Bonds, Bernie Williams, and Alex Rodriguez; as of 2005, Rodriguez's deal, for $252 million over 10 years, is still the most expensive contract in U.S. professional sports.