Yeah - it's stunning the lengths that fans are now willing go to blame rancorous negotiations on Boras and ignore the player entirely. When Manny shot his way out of town in 2008, Bill Simmons wrote an article called, Manny Being Manipulated, where Bill created a whole theory about how Boras was actually to blame for Manny going off the reservation. It's just so much easier to blame the agent, and Boras purposefully makes himself a great target. But the players obviously love him, and the GM's clearly respect him (there's an interesting article by Jim Bowden here where he describes Boras as a worthy adversary).
I think you'd have to go a little further down the great chain of being - a bagel slicer? - to find a worthy adversary for Bowden.
Ha! I'm never clear on whether "worthy" means "equal to me" or "at least as good as me." If it's the latter, Boras is indeed a worthy adversary, as would be most other agents, many pre-schoolers, and several types of household appliances.
It would soil his brand of it got out. He has spoken disdainfully of people who want to get him to "do a deal" that has nothing to do with baseball.
Funny you say that, because it's often been the case that the biggest force for the players in the NFL has been agents, not the PA. For instance, in 1999 Orlando Brown sued the NFL because ref Jeff Triplett hit him in the eye with a penalty flag and caused massive eye damage, but the NFLPA didn't lift a finger; the point man of the suit was Brown's agent Tom Condon. In most sports, the PA would raise a grievance - in the Upshaw-era NFLPA, you were on your own. Obviously, the NFLPA is more adversarial now, but they're still 40 years in baseball in rights and infrastructure.
