Only to the Pirates

In case you've missed it, the Pirates are locking horns with Pedro Alvarez and Scott Boras as we speak in quite possibly the most bizarre storyline yet from a series of already bizarre storylines. Check our old friend Dejan Kovacevic's PBC Blog for the complete up-to-the-minute details, and for now I wanted to weigh in with a few of my personal opinions.

I truly don't understand just what the heck Boras is doing here. He essentially is making two demands/claims here, one is that the Pirates signed Pedro Alvarez after the stated deadline, thus voiding his contract. The other is that, because of this, the Pirates should negotiate with Pedro Alvarez to a more amenable contract by their standards. Uhmm...what? What the hell does that even mean?

How can both of those things happen in the same vein of reality? If Boras gets his first request granted, that Alvarez was signed after the deadline and his deal should be voided, then the contract is terminated, does not go into effect and the Pirates certainly cannot then negotiate with him.

Seriously, this makes no sense whatsoever. And the big question now (besides what the end game here is) is, what took so long for this to come out? Seriously, the deadline was just about 2 weeks ago (okay 12 days), if this was an issue, why did it take up until now to come out? Why wasn't Boras raising a stink on the 16th or 17th?

My theory? I think ol' Scotty was shot down by the Alvarez family when the Pirates wouldn't pony up the dough, and the family threatened to go around him to get the contract with the Pirates, so Boras relented, but slowly, he began to whisper his poison into Pedro's ear. After a few days of this, Pedro was spun around and him and Boras were now united through Boras' manipulation, and now they are fighting against the Pirates for the money they feel that they deserve.