Team had to know how game is played

December 13, 2006|Bob Ryan, Globe Columnist

The hours are dwindling to a precious few, and Daisuke Matsuzaka remains unsigned. If midnight Thursday comes and he remains so, we can then indulge in one of modern America's favorite rituals: The Blame Game.

There's nothing new about The Blame Game. It goes back at least as far as the late '40s, when the parlor game du jour was "Who Lost China?" Nowadays, it seems to be a required procedure in the world of sport.

The Matsuzaka situation is particularly savory, because it includes a villain sent directly from Central Casting. Who among us hasn't been conditioned to loathe Scott Boras?

Mr. Boras is baseball's favorite punching bag. The very mention of his name spoils the day for some baseball executives. It happens to be the gospel truth that certain teams will not sign or trade for a Scott Boras client.

Your Boston Red Sox are not one of those teams. As my esteemed colleague Gordon Edes pointed out in these pages yesterday, they have two rather prominent Boras clients on their roster in Jason Varitek and J.D. Drew, and they have had others in the past. The Red Sox are not a Boras-phobic organization.

But as Edes also reminded us, Messrs. Varitek and Drew are illustrative of the Boras approach to negotiation. He advised each of them to ignore the offers made to them by the teams that had originally secured their draft rights. Varitek spurned an offer from the Twins and returned to school. The Mariners drafted him a year later and it took them 10 months to sign him, and then only when he came within three weeks of signing with a team in the independent Northern League.

Drew, a star at Florida State, was advised to turn down a fairly spectacular offer of $2.5 million to sign with the Phillies. He would eventually sign with the Cardinals, and to this day he is about as popular in the City of Brotherly Love as an IRS auditor.

In the minds of some, Boras doesn't negotiate. He waits. It is assumed that his favorite movie is "Dr. No."

OK, you get the picture. Scott Boras is involved. That being the case, we all knew from the start it was going to be, shall we say, tedious. As Tina Turner says in her raucous version of "Proud Mary," "We nevah, evah do nothin' nice and easy. We do it nice and rough."

So what do we have here? From afar, it would seem that the Red Sox see a classic case of "SBS," i.e. "Scott Being Scott." Their position is that they have heard nothing at all from Boras since they made an offer at the outset of the negotiations. And when they say "nothing," they mean "nothing." They are taking his non-response as a "No," but they would appreciate receiving what you call your basic "counterproposal."