A Hollywood ending: Manny returns to the Dodgers
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The war of words between baseball agent extraordinaire Scott Boras and Dodgers owner Frank McCourt has finally come to an end--for now--with the news from our crack sports reporter Dylan Hernandez that Manny Ramirez signed a new deal this morning with the Dodgers. Manny gets a two-year, $45-million contract that pays him $25 million this year and guarantees him $20 million in 2010. The deal, however, includes an opt-out clause that Ramirez can exercise at the end of the first year.
We’ve been following this saga from the showbiz perspective, since it points out the extraordinary differences between baseball and Hollywood negotiations. In baseball, the raw details of salary disputes are spread daily across the sports pages, while in Hollywood star negotiations are almost entirely veiled in secrecy until long after the deal is done. The Hollywood power brokers I spoke to were critical of McCourt’s willingness to joust with Boras in public, saying that by allowing Boras to stoke fans’ concerns, and by giving sports columnists a reason to second-guess Dodger strategy, the Dodger owner lost control of the negotiations.
In Hollywood, everything usually stays secret, which the studios see as an advantage. Unlike McCourt, who seemed to react emotionally to each Boras manipulation of events, studio executives largely treat negotiations as a bottom-line business. When an impasse is reached, their response is: Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Whenever McCourt lashed out at Boras, complaining about the agent’s tactics, it simply gave Boras more confidence, knowing the owner was rattled by the sports agent’s rope-a-dope strategy of not responding to new salary offers.
In the end, the Dodgers were negotiating against themselves, since Boras had no plausible offers from other teams. Yet even in one of the slowest free-agent markets in recent years, Boras managed to get Ramirez a two-year deal that, if Ramirez has another banner season, would allow his client to test the market again next winter when the economy is presumably in better shape. By betting on himself, Ramirez is, in some ways, acting a lot like a movie star who takes less money upfront and a bigger chunk of back-end payments, believing that if his film’s a hit, there will be more money coming his way from his share of the gross.
Maybe Boras has a future as a Hollywood agent after all. He realized that the Dodgers, playing in Hollywood’s backyard, needed a bankable star to fill their seats. And to the star goes the spoils. If the Dodgers win this year, Manny wins too. To use the old baseball maxim, in Dodgertown Manny is the straw that stirs the drink.
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