I won’t bore you with many details from my trip to the SABR convention in California last week–if for some insane reason you want the details, click here–but there was one interesting event actually related to baseball that seems particularly relevant to HBT.
Scott Boras (also known as “super agent Scott Boras”) gave the keynote speech prior to SABR’s annual business meeting Thursday morning, which I courageously attended at 8:30 a.m. Journalism!
Boras’ speech focused on the transition he made from college star and mediocre minor leaguer to one of the most powerful men in baseball and how he went from hitting .288 with a .738 OPS as an infielder at Single-A and Double-A to building a hugely successful agency that regularly makes use of sabermetrics and research.
We’ve certainly been critical of Boras, mostly for his hyperbolic hyping of clients and ability to manipulate certain media members, but he showed the type of charm and humor that makes it easy to understand how he’s able to talk star players into choosing him and general managers into signing his star players.
It also made me want to buy a used car.
At one point the lights in the ballroom dimmed and Boras didn’t skip a beat, quickly quipping that “SABR is a lot like the Dodgers, they don’t pay their bills either.”
He got big laughs throughout and even discussed the first time he realized as a young agent how much “managing the media” would help him, which would’ve gotten the biggest laugh of the entire 45-minute speech had Calcaterra been in attendance.
