Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 332: Will Jay Z Revolutionize Being a Baseball Agent?

Episode Date: November 19, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss Jay Z’s potential to be a new kind of agent, and whether they’d want to be one of his clients.

Scott Boris, you over, baby Robinson Cano, you coming with me Or, uh, what song was that? Crown? Was that Crown? Scott Boris, you over, baby Robinson Cano, you coming with me One of the homonautiest lines I ever heard in my life, man Like, tell another dude he's gone And he took the, uh, it was real weird

It was crazy Good morning, and welcome to episode 332 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. How are you? The same. Same as yesterday? Same as always? Always the same? All right, so did you bring a topic for us today? all right so did you bring a topic for us today i did i want to talk about um jay-z and uh well you know jay-z i've heard of him don't know him personally so uh so jay-z uh i don't know we want you and i haven't had a conversation about jay-z and in baseball and you know i'm not sure i've

seen a real conversation about jay-z in baseball there there I'm not sure I've seen a real conversation about Jay-Z in baseball. There may have been some, but mostly what I see are some jokes and some sort of flip comments about his role in negotiations or his role not in negotiations or whatever. But I don't know if we've grappled really with what it means that Jay-Z's going to be in the sport now,

or if it means anything. So the news hook on this is that Jay-Z's, well, Robinson Cano's, I guess, agent at CAA, which is what's representing him along with Jay-Z, who has a relationship with CAA, so it's kind of the same thing and kind of different. Anyway, his agent from CAA was on MLB Network Radio and said that Jay-Z is, quote, intimately involved in all areas of the process of Canoe's contract negotiations. So not just a famous name who's got this big umbrella that Robinson Cano falls under, but according to this is going to be intimately involved. So

who knows what that means, but intimate is a strong word and involved is an unambiguous word. So we might actually imagine that Jay-Z is actually paying attention to this. word so we might actually imagine that jay-z is actually paying attention to this um and so first of all i just want to know uh your kind of gut feeling about this whole thing when you heard about it and what you've seen so far do you think jay-z being in baseball has any significance is there any possibility this is going to change the industry or do you feel like this is, you know, like sort of just a celebrity putting his name on a product? I don't know. Maybe possibly it could make people pay attention to baseball who would not otherwise pay attention to baseball, possibly.

I don't know. People who are fans of Jay-Z and are not fans of baseball and will be interested because he is interested. I wouldn't expect it to really revolutionize the industry or anything. I think, did you read, there was a Jerry Krasnick piece about 10 days ago that sort of tried to spin it as a rivalry between Jay-Z and Scott Boris. Did you see that? I did not see that. So, and I think the idea was that sort of he's challenging Boris, you know, he he had a lyric about Boris on his not so great recent album. And I don't know.

Is that is that your is that your is that your assessment or Jerry Krasnick? Because I'm not sure who's I would take less seriously. That was that was my assessment. Jerry Krasnick did not weigh in on the album quality. did not weigh in on the album quality um but uh so there's the idea that that was sort of a shot across the bow of boris and he's you know he's coming for boris and everything and we we talked about that listener email right where someone asked us whether we we thought it was like you know boris steered alexander guerrero to the Dodgers to block Cano. And I said I thought that was unlikely,

but that maybe he sort of enjoyed it a little bit because of that anyway. So I don't know. There were, you know, quotes from people saying, oh, it's the clash of the Titans and everything. I thought it was probably a little bit overblown like it doesn't i mean not that boris would ever say anything that sounded like he was threatened but uh he he didn't it he i'll try to find the the exact quote but he i don't know he basically said something about how he's been doing this 30 years and he's not he's not afraid of of the new guy on the block.

And and I mean, Jay-Z had to get certified as as an agent to to be involved intimately, whatever that means. So he is a real sports agent or a real baseball agent, at least. a real baseball agent at least. And I wouldn't really want him to be my sole agent probably if I were about to cash in just because he's inexperienced, although he's clearly a very smart businessman. But I would think that the combination of his sort of star power and the expertise of more experienced agents would, I mean, if I were running an agency i would want jay-z to to be the face of it or a face of it to attract clients right i mean that's got

to be a good move yeah the well uh yeah i mean we don't really care about uh whether caa profits from this we're more interested in whether the players profit from him. And that's a little bit different. I mean, the client doesn't care if he attracts you. You're already attracted. But I originally started thinking about Jay-Z today because I also thought, is he the guy I would want being my agent? And are we going to look back in five months

and be able to draw conclusions about whether Jay-Z screwed up or was incredible by Cano's contract or whether one contract doesn't tell us much? But then I started – I changed my mind. I actually think that we might conceivably be dramatically, dramatically underestimating what this means. It might mean nothing. It might be that Jay-Z spins this off into some profit and some access to something else and moves upward but it does seem like it's conceivable that we are way way under uh you know underestimating what he does and i mean what he does is kind of incredible like everywhere he goes he does seem to create some new synergistic you know like Avenue for distribution or marketing and I wonder what it would be

like if you sign one of those clients and then you you'll get him first if you own a Samsung phone or something yeah Yeah, exactly. Anybody with a Samsung phone gets Robinson Cano before everyone else. Well, no, I mean, yeah. So the Samsung phone is the most obvious, you know, that's the big story of Jay-Z's last year, right? He basically got Samsung to give him, you know, what was estimated at $20 million worth of free marketing. They bought a million downloads of his song before it even came out. So he could sing about being platinum before it even came out. I mean, it was this huge coup for a pretty weak album from a guy who doesn't really sell that many albums. It doesn't seem to me anymore. I mean, he does, he, he sells a lot cause he's a big name, but he's not particularly relevant in music the way that a lot of other rappers are right now. But you know, he, he was extremely relevant. And so,

but that's what you, that's sort of the story you think about with the Samsung is Jay-Z using it to sell his brand and to make money, but there's this other twist on it. And so New York Magazine wrote this great profile of Jay-Z and his business network, which touched only a little bit on the Cano stuff, but talked about, you know, where he's got his various fingers right now. And so I'm just going to read for a bit. I wanted to read the entire thing because it was really interesting, but it's too long. It's like

4,000 words. So I'm going to read, I think, two paragraphs right now. And it's about, it's kind of about the Samsung thing. So if the promotional connection between the agency and the new album, the new album and the agency were basically, they came out right around the same time. So if the promotional connection between the agency and the new album might seem tenuous, it made sense to one audience, professional athletes. The night the Samsung ad ran during the NBA Finals, CJ McCollum, a guard who was expected to be picked high in the draft, sent out a tweet marveling that Jay-Z had, quote, managed to pitch his album and was probably paid by Galaxy 2. At an interview session the day before the draft, McCollum and other touted prospects spoke admiringly of Carter's marketing savvy.

Quote, it's Jay-Z, said Ben McLemore, who was wooed by Roc Nation, as was New Orleans Noel, thought by many to be the draft's top talent. Last week, we're going to do baseball. You know, I'm Stiazio Puglia and you want to assess this. In a radio interview, Carter said he was seeking to get clients, quote, their just due, as opposed to, quote, half-ass agents or people who rob them. And then I'm skipping ahead just a little bit. After Cano's signing, rumors circulated around baseball of exorbitant endorsement promises and many experienced

agents question whether Roc Nation will be able to deliver, Cano's upcoming free agency will be closely watched. Quote, in baseball and the owner's game of player contracts, it's about what you know, not who knows you, Bora said. Fame plays no part. Other agents asked whether Carter was prepared for the recruiting corruption and grasping families, the 24-hour demands of client service. Sports leagues are legalized cartels with controls on compensation, but there are many other ways to profit from athletes. Iconics has been hinting about, quote, new exciting initiatives to revive rockware, and there are market rumors about a sportswear line.

Networks in search of content that can't easily be fast forwarded have been showering even marginal sports like soccer with cash creating a boom economy kevin lillies who watched game seven of the finals with carter told me if i wanted an idea of what his friend had planned for his sports clients i should look at the equity driven deals he's negotiated for himself quote sports is just another piece of a portfolio that he's building to curate culture to challenge the status quo. Why can't they start to make different demands in the sports business? So a few pieces of background. One is that Jay-Z, one of the things that he was, you know, that really made him rich early on is that he negotiated a deal with, geez, I forget who his label was at the time, but it was extremely

performance bonus driven. The quote in one of these stories is, they didn't expect us to be big. And so he sold five million records of Hard Knock Life and he sold 21 million records over a five year period and he got just a huge cut of that. Canoe, shortly after he signed with Jay-Z, signed a multi-million dollar endorsement deal with Pepsi to be the face of Pepsi, along with Beyonce. I don't know if that's to Jay-Z's credit or not, but it's kind of linked to him. Ken Griffey Jr., who is probably the most marketed baseball player of our lifetimes by, I would guess, a substantial margin, he was only making like $5 million a year at his very peak in the late 90s

in endorsements. So, you know, it's obviously been noted that baseball endorsements are not anywhere near basketball endorsements or even, you know, really football endorsements. I mean, Jordan was making $35 million a year at the time. Andey, this legendary iconic baseball player in the prime of his career and appealing to multiple demographics was only making $5 million. If you think of it from the perspective of A, really changing the way that baseball players market themselves outside of the sport, that could be significant. I mean, there's multiple layers of significance that we probably can't even imagine, but that

might be significant. And if you're talking about contract stuff, if the Jay-Z model is to build equity-driven deals, the equivalent would be to be much more aggressive about actually the player negotiating performance demands. I mean, right now we think about bonuses usually as a way for teams to limit their risk on guys who are risky. But if players were, I mean, it's just a math problem in either direction. If players took control of that and started making it so that they could kind of have, I don't know,

sort of scale their success to a much higher degree. I mean, we talked about whether it's conceivable that we'll ever see a player go one year at a time instead of taking the discount on a long-term deal. You know, it's conceivable that the Jay-Z model might be, you know, for Kano to take a one-year $40 million contract or something like that i don't know so there was a there was a quote from boris about endorsements in the krasnick piece and he seems to say that uh that there isn't as much potential for endorsement deals in baseball as there is in basketball or other sports now it could just be that he is out of touch and he's behind the times and he doesn't see the potential that someone like Jay-Z could see.

He says, marketing is completely different in baseball than if you're a model or a musician or even a basketball or football player. It requires tremendous knowledge of the industry and the player to do this correctly. If you don't do it correctly, anything you make in marketing will serve as a loss of hundreds of millions in what a player can earn contractually. The idea being that baseball is such a grind, the season is so long, players don't have the desire or they don't have the time to go on photo shoots or video shoots or whatever endorsement deals require. And then there are quotes from Matt Holliday saying, I have kids and I'm playing all the time and I don't have time to do endorsements.

Not that companies are knocking down the door to have Matt Holliday be their pitchman. But he says, Scott has a great marketing team and they tell you they can get you some side money. But the one thing he stresses is you can make a ton of money as a great baseball player. So worry about being the best player you can be. They don't necessarily want their clients flying around the country doing commercials in the offseason. That's a great opportunity to work on your game and your body to make sure you're ready to endure 162 games at the highest level. So, again, maybe he's not seeing the potential to make tons of money. Maybe Jay-Z can go to Robinson Cano and say, well, Scott Boras says you can't make hundreds of million dollars in endorsements and also be a productive player.

I say you can, and I know better than he does because of my experience doing X, Y, and Z. And maybe that could be a persuasive pitch for some players. Yeah, I mean, the smart money is always to bet on not much change, right? I mean, the grand idea of some future where we all have flying cars is usually the long shot. So probably he won't revolutionize the game or anything about it. But I just think that there's that, you know, the whole point is that this is the sort of thing that you would have said about every, every avenue where Jay-Z has done something different and made a ton of money in it. I mean, I'm going to read again. I mean, so, okay. So Jay-Z had a book called, I think, Decoded that

came out like three years ago. So Spiegel and Grau had paid seven figures for the rights to the book, but the editor had only $50,000 budgeted for marking. Quote, I was shocked, Carter's longtime business manager, John Manali, told the authors of a Harvard Business School study. I thought she was missing a couple of zeros. So the imprint approached Dragos, a innovative advertising agency, which came up with the idea of hiding pages of the book all over the world. Fans could look for them via Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft, which covered

the $2 million cost of the campaign. Even so, Carter insisted on approval of every detail from the wording of clues to the size of Bing's logo. And, I mean, there's sort of three really crucial elements to that anecdote that packed in there. One is that they turned a $50,000 budget into a $2 million budget, which is like a massive, massive difference. Two is that they did it kind of in a synergistic way so that they didn't actually have to pay for it themselves. And three is that the last part, which is really the significant one, because again, I've all along been thinking Jay-Z's probably not actually a part of any of this because he's really, really, really busy. And I know how busy even normal busy people

are. So when you start talking about a person who is that busy, you figure he can't possibly have any time to add anything. But the insisted on approval of every detail from the wording of clues to the size of Bing's logo makes you think that his presence might actually be significant, that it's not simply the power. The fact that there's sort of this weird situation where Jay-Z himself is kind of a microcosm of what he's promising the players. Basically, I think of Robinson Cano already as much more marketable than I did six months ago because of the connection to Jay-Z. There's something exclusive about his client list, for one thing. It's very elite players. I mean, he got Kevin Durant, for Pete's sake. He's only got five guys. And, you know, one of them is the third best player in baseball.

And one of them is the second best player in basketball. And one of them is the best player in WNBA. And, you know, he's like, he gets these superstar guys. And so just by being associated with Jay-Z, he's kind of showing the power of brand and he is meanwhile then selling them on being a brand he's you know it's it's like this like double layer thing where he he's saying you know this is what i confer upon you and you will have that to confer upon others uh you know in in your own way so it's like uh i don't know it's it's interesting it'll be interesting to see whether he dilutes that by signing set like if he signs Cespedes, it would work for Cespedes.

But would it kind of water down the effect on Cano a little bit? And you wonder whether he does better if he only has like six or seven guys at any given time or athletes at any given time. Yeah, I wonder whether there's the kind of potential for baseball players to cash in like other athletes have. Just, A, for some of the reasons that we've mentioned, like the fact that the season is so long and there's not so much free time. But just, I don't know, baseball fans are older, right? So maybe they're not kind of in the desirable demographics for certain products. the desirable demographics for certain products. There are probably, I guess, fewer of them watching baseball on TV regularly than, say, football has, certainly. And just, I don't know, isn't it like, I mean, doesn't David Stern get a lot of credit for kind of turning the NBA into a

star-driven league? That's something that he sort of of did and i wonder whether that is even possible in baseball because i don't know just in terms of face time just in terms of how often you see a player it's not you know five guys on the floor or whatever where one guy's getting the ball constantly it's you're you're one of nine guys you you come up now and then you're not the guy who always gets the ball in the big spot because you you get the bat nine guys you you come up now and then you're not the guy who always gets the ball in the big spot because you you get the bat whatever you happen to be up in the batting order so you don't i mean yeah and and most of the time you're indistinguishable from the other games i mean you you stand out oh you know every 20th plate appearance you do something different

it's not like lebron lebron takes over the game lebron takes over every single game at some point like if you turn on a game to watch lebron you can do it any game and and do that with cano you're gonna get like i don't know 14 good games a year or something where he actually looks any different than you know the other guys around him i mean that's what makes that's what makes sort of david ortiz even if you hit a home run, you run the bases and you go back into the dugout. No one sees you for a while. Yeah, yeah, that seems fair. Yeah, I mean, that seems relevant.

That seems more relevant than the we're too busy part of it. Yeah, so. I mean, they do find time to record an awful lot of local radio ads. Yeah, that's true. Car dealerships and – yeah, so – Plumber's unions. So I don't know. Maybe – yeah, maybe just being associated with him gives kind of a bump to certain clients. I don't know if it could be a really industry-changing thing unless he does something so out of the box that we're not even thinking about it

and just ties in baseball players with all sorts of other products and maybe other sports and just brings them all together kind of under his umbrella. thing that I guess would be a concern if you were deciding whether you wanted him to represent you was just sort of whether whether he has the time to devote his attention fully to you and that's kind of the angle that that Boris pushes sort of without without directly mentioning Jay-Z in this Krasnick piece he takes some shots at him and he says, if Steven Spielberg walked into USC Medical Center and said, I want to do neurosurgery, they don't give him a scalpel, which is pretty good for his quote. And he also, you know, and then he talks about how his agency is 24-7 baseball. They don't do other sports. If you call him at any time of day or night, you know, he's, call him at any time of day or night you know he's he's focusing on baseball clients and that's all he does whereas like you know and he puts in his annual appearance at the winter meetings where he

strides through the lobby and the waves part for him to pass and then he does an incredible press conference with great quotes and everything and and clients know that he's there he's on the scene meeting with gms and everything whereas as krasnick points out jay-z will be on tour in california at the winter meeting so unless he's flying back and forth he's not going to be a constant presence so you know so that's maybe something that would give you pause if if you're someone like kano who's who's about to sign the most important contract of your life and your agent is kind of, you know, on stage or recording an album or not really focusing on you and just sort of has subordinates taking care of the actual business stuff, then maybe that's something that would give you pause but then there's one more

quote and this will be the last thing i read uh from a an unnamed prominent baseball agent who basically says sort of what you were saying this guy is mega wealthy and uber successful he's probably negotiated his own deals with record executives who are more cutthroat than any gm of a baseball team you want to talk about big business, that's big business. This isn't rocket science. The guys at CAA have put a ton of time into it and know every variable and every contract constructed. They have that template laid.

Sure, there are certain nuances in negotiating in this environment, and JC has none of them, but I don't think he's going to have any problem getting his phone calls returned. That is exactly what I wish I could have said in words, because that is exactly right. I mean, this is not film directing and neuroscience. This is hustling and hustling. There are two kinds of hustling. And clearly, there is training that is required to do each different type of hustling, but the skill set is primarily, you know, I would guess the

skill set has a lot of overlap. Yeah, I agree. So it'll be interesting to watch. It will be interesting to watch. It will be partly interesting to watch to see if Jay-Z is actually involved, and then it will be really interesting to watch to see whether he can do it. So, all right, well, I'm glad we... And if anything, it's probably just more bad news for the little agent. Right. Without the giant agency. I don't know whether it's a direct threat to Boris because, you know, he might miss out on a high end client every now and then or someone like Kanoa might leave him for Jay-Z. But I would guess there's probably enough of the elite talent to go around. enough of the elite talent to go around but it's probably bad news for the little guy who already has trouble attracting clients because he doesn't have the same infrastructure to offer and the same sort of you know giant organization with all the amenities and and all the attention and everything

and just kind of has to has to sell a client on I'm going to give you the best service because I don't have as many clients or that kind of angle. Maybe that's bad news for the little guy. And it's just more and more big guys taking larger slices of the pie. I anticipate that someone is going to have heard at the beginning of the show when I said something along the lines of Jay-Z is not particularly relevant or doesn't move units anymore or something like that and contradict me. So I'll just acknowledge off the top that I was probably wrong about that, and I appreciate your concern. You're speaking artistically about his recent musical output. Yeah. I don't know.

I don't know. Actually, I don't quite know. I don't know. Okay. All right. So you can be sending us emails at... How many Jay-Z records do you have, Ben? I have a bunch, actually. I admire the man and his work. What's your favorite? I'm a Black Album guy.

Oh, really? Okay. what's your what's your favorite i'm a black album guy oh really okay okay all right uh so not my not my favorite never never never emotionally moved me that would be probably like uh it probably a distant number three for me what what is yours uh reasonable doubt would be my my favorite and and uh blueprint would be good choices all right uh so send us emails you know what i love you know what i did like i liked uh i liked uh the unplugged that's a good that's a it's an underrated classic right there the mtv unplugged don't have roots uh you gotta you gotta get it it's on the internet look into it uh podcast at baseball prospectus.com we will be back tomorrow