2 weeks Ago By Zachary D. Rymer
Scott Boras has come here to drop puns and to get as much as $1 billion for his clients. And he's nowhere near out of puns. If anything can be taken away from this week's GM meetings, it's that MLB's most famous agent still has the gift of gab.
Boras had a pun for every one of his foremost clients, and each was cringier than the last: Did Boras also have one for Juan Soto ? You bet he also had one for Juan Soto: Juanderful. Er, won derful. Crafting fun and semi-creative ways to hype his clients is nothing new for Boras, who secured over $1 billion in earnings in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 offseasons.
Yet the difference this time is that he's on something of a revenge tour. Boras also entered last winter with a stacked deck, but as time went on, he ultimately found himself playing 52-card pickup. He undershot projections for his top guys by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Now that he's proved he's still a good hype man, Boras must prove that last winter was a one-off. The 2023-24 Offseason Was Boras' Low Point Because one more pun never hurt anyone—Fact Check: Pants on Fire—here's what Boras said about Cody Bellinger at the outset of the 2023-24 offseason: Boras was also set to represent Snell, who had just won his second Cy Young Award, and fellow ace Jordan Montgomery and All-Star third baseman Matt Chapman. All told, MLB Trade Rumors projected them to pull in 41 years and $764 million.
But as it turned out, all four languished on the market into the spring and ended up getting just nine years and $221 million. Montgomery pulled no punches, saying in August that Boras had "kind of butchered" his free agency. That basically confirmed what everyone was already thinking, in that Boras was guilty of misreading last winter's market.
The charitable take is initial projections for Boras' clients were never realistic. But that doesn't let him off the hook, particularly where Chapman was concerned. Boras had previously turned him away from not one , but two nine-figure extension offers.
Yet in securing a six-year, $150 million extension from the San Francisco Giants for Chapman in September, Boras has already taken a big step toward redemption. The only question now is how big the next ones will be. Boras Has a Much Better Hand to Play for 2024-25 Let's put the over/under for Soto, Burnes, Snell, Bregman and Alonso at $1 billion.
In fact, make it $1.3 billion. That is roughly where MLB Trade Rumors projects those guys' earning power, and they may be aiming too low on Soto at 13 years, $600 million, as Jon Heyman of the New York Post suggested last week.
$700 million suits Soto better. While Boras hasn't put a specific price tag on the four-time All-Star, he has indicated that Soto's deal won't be watered down by deferrals like Shohei Ohtani's 10-year, $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers: As he's comparable to some of the greatest hitters in history , $700 million for Soto is not an unreasonable ask. Even a 10-year deal at Ohtani's adjusted average value of $46 million gets Soto to $460 million, and Soto (26) is four years younger than Ohtani (30).
Burnes, meanwhile, has strikeout-related questions but also a track record of a Cy Young Award winner who has never been on the IL with an arm or shoulder injury. He's one of a kind in the latter sense. For his part, Snell is unencumbered by the qualifying offer after opting out of his deal with the Giants.
He's also coming off one of the best 14-start stretches of his career. Bregman and Alonso are the two best corner infielders on the market. Bregman is the all-time leader in postseason home runs by a third baseman, while Alonso is second to only Aaron Judge in regular-season homers since 2019.
Hence the obligatory question: What could possibly go wrong? Will Boras Disappoint Again? Though he didn't technically hurt his client in the process, Boras has already had one misstep. Another of his guys is New York Yankees ace Gerrit Cole, who took a chance by opting out of the four years and $144 million he had left on his contract. The Yankees could either keep him by granting him another year and $36 million or let him become a free agent.
It was a game of chicken, and Cole and Boras flinched first. On Monday, the righty agreed to honor the original four-year arrangement. "I don't think he would have gotten five years at $180 million on the open market," an American League executive told Mark Feinsand of MLB.
com. "I don't even know about four years and $144 million. I actually thought maybe the Yankees would just let him walk.
" The whole situation inevitably renews questions that popped up last winter about Boras' ability to read the room. The collapse of the RSN broadcasting model hit too many teams in their wallets, while traditional big-spenders like the Yankees, New York Mets and Boston Red Sox kept the free-agent market at arm's length. Accordingly, the writing was on the wall that Boras was not in a strong negotiating position.
He should have realized that immediately, and his failure to do so only became more damaging once he resorted to his " Mr. January " tactic of trying to wait the teams out. Fast-forward to today and the RSN situation hasn't gotten any better .
Boras himself sees promise in how clubs are " building their own platforms " for broadcasting, but the general sense is that the ongoing uncertainty will have a chilling effect all over again. But if that's a bad omen for Boras, there's also a very, very good omen that should work to his advantage. Whereas only the Dodgers spent big in free agency (i.
e., over $1 billion) last winter, they, the Yankees and the Mets are all primed to make noise this winter. Per FanGraphs' projections for 2025, the three are about $300 million short of what they spent in 2024.
And according to Heyman , each is in on Soto. The Red Sox, meanwhile, may be ready to get back in the spending game: Other potential spenders include: With Soto alone likely to outdo what Boras got for all his clients last winter, it is impossible to imagine this offseason being yet another disappointing outing for the 72-year-old. And if the teams that should spend pick up even two or three of his other guys, this should be his third $1 billion offseason out of the last four.
Thus would Boras prove that he's still got it. Or, as he might put it. Everyone turned to me and said, "He's got nothing for us.
" But I'll tell you right now that the money will be there in plethoras. You'll be blinded like you're looking at a million auroras. And you will know I'm still Scott Boras.
Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference , FanGraphs and Baseball Savant ..
