Scott Boras’ Top Clients to Fall Short of Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s $325 Million Pact? Super Agent’s Miscalculations Backfire

Scott Boras’ winter of disappointment has now become a Spring of heartbreaks. The super agent has seen his clients take up deals that aren’t even half what they expected to sign. Is it Boras’ fault or is the market slow? That’s the question that nearly every fan is asking right now. However, one needs to understand just how deep the disappointment runs for Boras. For an agent who has continuously reached new milestones, he cannot even cross one this offseason.

The offseason was off to a great start when Shohei Ohtani signed a $700 million deal. The LA Dodgers followed that up with Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s $325 million. With four (or five) of Boras’ clients still in the market, the game was on. Would Boras break Yamamotos’ record? Would he try to win this offseason after these deals? That was the question. However, as of now – not only could Boras not break Yamamoto’s record, he couldn’t even come to shooting distance from it.

Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic has shared a massive statistic in his recent article. While discussing Boras’ unexpected downfall, he noted how he couldn’t touch Yamamoto’s record even on an aggregate basis. “The Boras Four, including Montgomery, could end up getting less combined than right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto,” Rosenthal wrote.

Cody Bellinger signed a three-year $80 million deal and Matt Chapman got a three-year $54 million deal. Now Blake Snell has agreed to a two-year $62 million deal with the San Francisco Giants. So as of now, Boras needs $129 million more to equal Yamamoto’s deal – a number that looks too big currently. With only Jordan Montgomery (and J.D. Martinez) left, Boras’ offseason could prove to be a historical failure for the agent.

With speculations growing that Montgomery too can seek a short-term deal, one wonders just what went wrong for Boras this offseason. Was it high pricing or was it a slow market?

How Scott Boras caught the worst of the storm this offseason?

Ohtani and Yamamoto’s deals may have given false hopes of an active market to Boras. But the rest of the league remained quiet and barely indulged in the free-agent market. As a result, after 2022-23’s historic $3.9 billion spend, this season’s teams went down to just $2.8 billion. $1.1 billion of that was spent by the Dodgers. 

So with such a depressed market, Boras had a tough job. On top of that, the entire offseason was filled with reports of Boras overvaluing his clients. Evidence of this was Boras rejecting the New York Yankees’ initial offer for Snell. Did the super agent overplay his hand? While that’s just a speculation, high expectations didn’t help in a slow market.

So in the end Boras has found himself in a losing position. However, his 2024-25 lineup looks stacked with Juan Soto and Pete Alonso to lead the free-agent market. Moving on from disappointments, Boras can bounce back with a vengeance if he wants to. But will he?

Read more: Giants’ Blake Snell Signing Brings Cy Young Front Runners Together: Breaking Down SF’s Rotation