Drew was in the big leagues at 22. He earned about $14 million in his first five years, and has been paid more than $66 million overall. Pretty good for a guy who can’t always find his way onto the field.

Health problems have conspired against Drew – a notorious underachiever who was full of himself – more than has his agent.

He never got bigger money early partly because teams questioned if he could answer the bell for even 120 games – which is something that he failed to do in half of his first six full seasons in MLB.

To say that he missed two years of “prime service” is highly subjective for a couple of reasons, health being just one of them.

Another is that the Phils, who drafted him despite being told he would not sign with them, were not willing to pay the ridiculous sum Drew was asking, anyway. In short, no one was going to pay him big money, so his agent could not have been the problem – Drew would not have been given 10s of millions no matter what the situation.

Being only the Phils could negotiate with him, he was as much at the mercy of the parameters of the baseball draft as he was at the mercy of his agent.

It’s also a leap to simply suggest Drew missed two years of “prime service.” He missed a year of service when he was barely out of his teens, and for most players the first years in the majors are not prime service.

This is all pure speculation, guinness junky, since I am not an expert in contract negotiations, and your point that ultimately it’s the player who is responsible for his agent is valid.

That said, I think an agent like Boras holds a lot more cards than you think. Just look at hedge fund managers and how they screwed over their investors to make short-term bonus money based on a percentage of earnings for their clients. That compensation structure is a similar to the x% Scott Boras gets on every contract he signs. It’s also similar in that hedge fund managers and baseball agents are basically making a living off other people’s money.

Now, hedge funds weren’t regulated by the SEC on the theory that people investing in hedge funds should be savvy enough to know what they’re getting themselves into. Obviously, that didn’t work. Investors trusted hedge fund managers even though these investors were supposedly some of the smartest institutions and individuals around. Now, lets jump down a couple rungs on the financial intelligence ladder to major league ball players, who I am guessing know next to nothing about money. That’s not a knock on major league ball players, but it’s not something a hitting coach kicks down to you in AA ball.

A few years back, a group of economists including Joseph Stiglitz won the nobel prize for their theory of asymmetric information. If there ever was a case of one party having a monopoly on information here, I’d say it was Scott Boras over his clients.

Now I think you’re right, no one’s holding a gun to Joe Crede’s or JD Drew’s or A-Rod’s head. They want to maximize their contracts, and Boras has a reputation as someone who can do that. But until recently, a lot of private capital funds had the same reputation. That doesn’t absolve ball players of blame for their role in this equation, but I think it’s probably more one of ignorance than one of active complicity.