Remember when super agent Scott Boras ripped Chicago Cubs ownership (and then again) for failing to spend big league dollars during the current rebuild?
“I’m talking about – if this is a family-owned team – where is the [major-market approach]?” Boras said to the media in November (CSN, for example). “This is Chicago. You’re developing the infrastructure. But fans don’t come to see seats, grass, cement. They come to see players. They’ve done a great job in the draft and development and they’ve got a really good core of young players coming. But it’s just not what’s expected when you buy a major-market club.”
In December, Boras called the Cubs’ rebuild “an all-day sucker,” again pointing out that the Cubs are a big market team with big market revenues and aren’t spending. It was easy enough to say, however, that this was just an agent bein’ an agent, trying to put the pressure on a large market team to spend more money on (his) players.
Fast-forward to today, and here are some quotes from Scott Boras on the Toronto Blue Jays and their owner, Rogers Communications (per Ken Rosenthal):
“There is no one who has the asset base of Rogers,” Boras said. “It’s a premium city. It’s a premium owner with equity. And it’s a very, very good team that with additional premium talent could become a contending team …. They’re a car with a huge engine that is impeded by a big corporate stop sign … a successful and committed ownership that needs to give their baseball people financial flexibility.”
So, not that you didn’t already know, but, like, this is just something Boras does. Maybe he’s right sometimes, and maybe he’s wrong sometimes. But this is his job, and he has a clear interest in getting teams to spend as much money as possible.
And if it means calling plays out of the same playbook on multiple ownership groups, then so be it.