Scott Boras is talented, infamous, driven, hated, successful, loathsome, arrogant, and omnipresent. Opinions about the 51-year old agent vary from disdain to rage to full-out hatred. As Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Tribune put it, “he is a very, very bad man. Exquisitely bad, in a foreclose-on-the-farm sort of way.”

With Boras again in the news lately as a result of the Amateur Draft and the trading of Carlos Beltran, I went back and read two of the better pieces written about the super-agent in the past few years. The first, a feature-length profile penned by Scott Raab and published in the April 2001 edition of Esquire, does a fantastic job of outlining just what Boras does and why he does it.

Managers and general managers—without talent, they’re quickly out of work. Sometimes, they rush raw players, over-pitch young arms, destroy confidence and careers. Owners will bargain hard and then present themselves as victims of greed. Commissioners will poor-mouth the product and scapegoat the talent. The players are the game, but sometimes the men who run the sport lose sight of that.

Never Boras. Yes, he is shrewd. Tireless. Calculating. Wickedly smart. That doesn’t make him Satan; if you’re a ballplayer, that makes Scott Boras the guy you want covering your back. He has a staff of fifteen; eight played big-league ball. Some coached and managed; some went to Harvard, Stanford, Duke. They wear T-shirts and jeans to work; they eat lunch at a sports bar, order chili, and make fart jokes; they spend eighteen-hour days at the office six, seven days a week; and they can’t wait to tell you why Jason Varitek deserves to be paid more for his fourth season than Jorge Posada got. Boras has ten scouts planted in baseball hotbeds from Cape Cod to Venezuela, a fulltime sports psychologist, and a computer engineer who used to work for NASA.

“Every working hour is the game,” says Boras. “I wasn’t playing baseball for the money—I knew that early on. I was playing to compete. It was a kick. It was really, really challenging. This is my life. That’s what I do. It’s a privilege. It’s just great. It’s just never anything but absolutely intriguing for me.”

The article is not available online, but can be accessed via several full-text databases. If you have a chance, track it down - the title is “Jackpot!” and is in Volume 135, Issue 4 of Esquire.

The other piece is more recent. Written by Matthew Benjamin and titled “Go-To Guy,” it was published in US News & World Report this May and discusses the impact Boras has had (and is continuing to have) on the game of baseball.

General managers say Boras’s poker skills are his real asset. He always seems to conjure up a competing offer—or hints at one—that drives a player’s price through the roof. That gambit cemented Bernie Williams’s seven-year, $87.5 million offer from the Yankees in 1998, which Boras calls his toughest negotiation so far. “He was a 20-home-run center fielder, and we wanted 40-home-run money,” he says. “It took a lot of information, a lot of data, to get him that. In the end, we got an offer from the Red Sox, and [Yankees owner George] Steinbrenner came around.” Yankees GM Brian Cashman calls Boras a very tough negotiator but says the market ultimately sets the price: “Scott’s a seller and we’re the buyer. He’s willing to take chances, and his clients are willing to take chances with him.”

Love him or hate him (how could you love him?!?), Boras is an influential part of the baseball landscape. His name is almost universally known and has become symbolic of fans’ and commentators’ overall gripes with the game. Too often, however, it seems as if those whose voices are heard loudest are also the least informed about the reality of who Boras is and how he operates. Hopefully, these two excellent articles will help add some nuance to the unending debates about Boras, money, greed, and baseball. If you’re interested in knowing more, they are definitely worth checking out.