THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

The Alvarez signing agreement was public knowledge by 1 am (I was up biting my nails). I was not aware at the time that they might have had an extension to go past midnight, but if they did, it was appareny not a “couple hours”.

But, any extension at all will let guys like Boras look for an edge. Any grey invites exploitation.

Apparently, a similar situation happened with ARod and Boras:

http://proxy.espn.go.com/chat/chatESPN?event_id=22105

SportsNation Jim Callis: We won’t have a resolution today and the rhetoric will get ramped up, I’m sure. It’s interesting to note that Boras tried the same thing with A-Rod in 1993. After a long holdout, the family asked someone else to talk to the Mariners on their behalf and a deal was reached. Boras filed a grievance saying that the team ignored A-Rod’s right to his chosen representative, and wanted A-Rod granted free agency or (sound familiar) the right to renegotiate. The Pirates’ statement says that “an agreement was reached only after Pedro took control of the negotiations,” so I wonder if that’s the basis of Boras’ complaint. That didn’t work with A-Rod, though.

I thought it was interesting to note that Kevin Goldstein noted that some baseball people he talked to said Alvarez would get $17-$22 million on the open market in the article linked on my name.  $17 million is essentially the NPV of 26-50 hitting prospects and $22 the NPV of 11-25 hitting prospects.  So basically what industry sources are saying is that Alvarez is a 11-50 caliber prospect without even playing in a professional game.

More history from Kevin Goldstein:
http://baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=8012