Scott Boras

Very interesting essay on Scott Boras in The New Yorker. The story makes Boras out to be some sort of mad scientist.

“We’re purists about the game,” Boras told me. “We’re about commitment. We’re about making you better.” He brought up, as an example, Barry Zito, the San Francisco Giants’ lefty who is known almost as much for his surfer persona as for his sweeping curveball. “What we did with Barry Zito a year and a half ago is one of my better pieces of work,” he said. “It was really about getting him to be him. I call him Zicasso. The thing is, he wants to pitch powerfully, and I’m saying, ‘No, you’re Zicasso! You got to be the artist-poet-intellectual. That’s what you’re out there to do.’ He feeds off it. ‘You’re Zicasso. You come out and you paint!’ ” He added a wavelike flourish with his arm to punctuate each new mention of Zicasso—whose performance in the past couple of years, incidentally, has not been discernibly better than it was before.

After reading that it isn't hard to believe that Peter Gammons assertion is true that Boras and his crew screwed up Red Sox prospect Craig Hansen by changing the delivery motion that made him successful as a college player into a so-so AAA pitcher.