I previously posted about my concerns about Daisuke Matsuzaka being signed. The good news is that the deal was consummated today and he is now officially a Red Sox player. Of greater interest is where the deal ended up. His agent, Scott Boras, was making all this noise about how Daisuke deserved something like $15 million plus per year. He was suggesting some serious numbers especially since the Red Sox paid over $50 million just to be able to negotiate! The Red Sox initial offer was something like $6 or $7 million per year; clearly a huge difference from $15 million.
In the end, it appears that the Red Sox got the better part of the deal. Paying $50 million over 6 years equates to be about $8 million per year which is substantially less than Boras was originally suggesting. Clearly Boras had little leverage in the negotiations and was trying to delay the negotiations to put the heat on the Red Sox and was unsuccessful since the resulting number was much closer to the Sox number.
This brings me to a final point, some of the media were lambasting Boras as a greedy and difficult agent. All of which may be true, but then again his job to get the most money for his clients. So while he may be greedy and difficult, isn’t that his job? Isn’t he supposed to get top dollar for his players? I am not a Scott Boras expert and so there may be other issues here, but simply playing hardball as an agent is not unreasonable especially since I am certain that the MLB teams are doing the same thing in the negotiations as well. There is no such thing as a free lunch for either party!