Scott Boras is the most influential agent in baseball and he's still not happy the Chicago Cubs started top prospect Kris Bryant in the minor leagues this season to keep him under club control for an extra year. Boras' proposal on Wednesday may spur a change regarding teams and their prospects.
If you don't know the whole situation regarding Bryant, you can read more about it here. The gist is that many believe the Cubs' decision to leave Bryant in the minors was solely in their business interests because if they kept him there for the first 12 days of the season, he would remain with the club one extra year (through the 2021 season), which delays his free agency and saves the organization millions.
However, president of baseball operations Theo Epstein has refuted that notion on multiple occasions and provided powerful evidence behind his reasoning. In the end, Bryant was promoted last Friday - exactly 12 days into the 2015 season - and appears to remain on track to stay with the club. While it may seem obvious the Cubs acted as if that was their master plan all along, it's really unclear as to what they had in store for Bryant because numerous injuries ultimately forced the 23-year-old to get the call.
Boras is still unhappy about it and he proposed a solution to prevent such a situation from occurring again.
"For example, I would say that the union or somebody may come in and say that they've made a claim that this player is major-league ready," he told Patrick Mooney of CSN Chicago. "And that to place him in the minor leagues would not be appropriate from a skills standpoint. And then all of a sudden, it's subject to review by a panel of former managers or baseball experts.
"It's objective in the sense that they're neutral. The only way subjective turns objective is that you've got the best-known experts who are going to make an evaluation of what they do."
Well, Boras is pretty much out of luck at least until December 1, 2016, which is when the current Collective Bargaining Agreement between the MLB and MLBPA expires. The CBA that was signed and finalized on November 22, 2011 gives MLB teams such control over their players, so the Cubs were well within their right to exercise their power over Bryant - for whatever means they felt were necessary.
The catch here is that Boras is upset for essentially the same reason as to why he believes the Cubs held Bryant back - money. Boras will have to wait an extra year to cash in on Bryant's lucrative free agent season, but he might be forgetting the Cubs will end up paying elsewhere.
"For as much grief as the Cubs took on Bryant, it's only fair to note they promoted Bryant, Russell without regard for Super Two concerns," FOX Sports' Ken Rosenthal tweeted on Tuesday.
Boras will have to wait a while for his request to be addressed, but at least he'll collect some nice commission in about two years.
