The Agent Who Intruded on a Pennant Race

9/8/2015

What Agents Do: David Skepner, Loretta Lynn, Wet Writer, Outside the Ryman, 1975

When I was helping Loretta Lynn write her book (“Coal Miner’s Daughter”), I got used to visible signs of security.

The bus driver, big Jim Webb, with his Elvis pompadour, tucked a softball bat under his seat – “In case a ball game breaks out,” he would drawl.

There were fake names in hotel registers, to foil stalkers.

And I got used to interviewing people with their pistols on the table. (“Umm, could you point that the other way and cover it with your ball cap?” I would ask.)

That security was necessary. So was Loretta’s formidable (and large) manager-agent, David Skepner, a Beverly Hills guy who had moved to Nashville.

“DAYYYY-vid,” Loretta would drawl. “You are mah son-of-a-bitch.”

After Skepner signed on, Loretta’s visibility went up, and so did her price. She won Country Music Entertainer of the Year, first woman to do so. She went on the “Today” show. She hired a writer (“Jawrge, you are mah wrahter”) and she watched talented people (not me) make a great movie about her life.

Even when they stopped working together, Loretta would call Skepner and get his guidance, now for free. He was her son-of-a-bitch.

I tell this story as Mets fans quiver over the machinations by Matt Harvey’s agent, the notorious Scott Boras, who has dropped a skunk in the middle of a garden party the Mets are tossing this September. He has raised questions – valid doctor’s questions, at a highly awkward time – about how many more innings the reconstructed Mr. Harvey should pitch this year. Possibly, you have heard of this.

Boras is Matt Harvey’s son-of-a-bitch. Of course, he was also A-Rod’s son-of-a-bitch -- until he botched a feint toward the Red Sox. They no longer work together.

Boras has led Harvey into a gross and intrusive display during a pennant race, but that is his job, until it isn’t his job. I am assuming the Mets were always going to minimize Harvey, more than 180 innings, far short of being a workhorse into the post-season. (Remember the speculation of whether Bartolo Colon would be on the post-season roster?)

Now the Mets may view Matt Harvey differently – as expensive collateral in the off-season: Cespedes Money. But that’s the chance agents and their clients take.

This is perhaps a little secret of life, but some writers also have agents. I had one, and now another, and both have served me well. I’m just guessing that some people who question Scott Boras’ ethics also have representation. In this cut-throat world, more people could use their own personal son-of-a-bitch.

Brian Savin

9/8/2015 06:13:55 pm

I just heard Terry Collins in his pre-game comments today and was hugely impressed by his (I think) brilliant way of diffusing this situation. His message was at some point Harvey was going to want his big compensation day, and Terry agreed with that and said Harvey had no thoughts other than what Collins sometimes thought about for himself. The manager seems determined to keep Harvey team focused, and I will bet he just did.

George Vecsey

9/9/2015 09:14:20 am

Brian, I totally agree on Collins. He didn't act as if he took the Harvey Camp agitprop personally. He has been terrific his whole tenure -- keeping together a cheap team, now fortified, getting some troops he deserves. The Mets have played for him since Day One. The last two games vs. Washington have been amazing -- I was sure they would lose both, just because, even though I have respect for their competitiveness. They also have leaders in the clubhouse -- Wright, Granderson, Cuddyer and now Uribe. They have bolstered Flores and now Harvey, kept the team together. GV

Brian Savin

9/9/2015 10:01:11 am

The best propaganda for agents I ever saw was the old Errol Flynn movie, "It's Tough to be Famous" in which he plays a submarine captain who saves his crew at the expense of his own life, but is himself miraculously saved and then has to live with the consequences. Walter Catlett plays an agent (in those days agents also needed a "real" job to make ends meet, so the character is also a magazine publisher of sorts) who Flynn ultimately and very, very reluctantly consents to hire when he faces no choice.

Josh Rubin

9/9/2015 10:51:26 am

Some fans like to brag about their teams. I tend to fret. Now that this team can hit, i've been fretting about pitching for weeks. It has been much less consistent of late, and I worry the young guns are all running out of gas, having all pitched incredibly well for most of the season.

Meanwhile, i agree with all of the nice things being said about Collins. He said Harvey should never have been caught i the middle of all that and that he (Collins) should have been more emphatic in urging Harvey not to talk. Harvey's a competitive guy and he wants to pitch every game AND is still smarting from having lost 1.5 seasons and does not want to go through that again. He must be twisted in knots inside. Wise of Collins to cut him some slack and it does not seem to be hurting team morale. Those guys are having fun and it is infectious.

Alan Rubin link

9/9/2015 09:49:25 pm

Regardless of the organization or business, good coaches and managers make a difference.

Over the years, there have been many striking examples of significant improvement or decline with the replacement of one individual.

Mindset by Carol Dweck is an excellent book about how people's mindsets make a difference.

Those with a positive learns from their mistakes and are always forward looking.

Those with negative mindsets take comfort in the status quo and avoid risk. They also surround themselves with like minded associates.

There are many interesting examples from all aspects of live, but I was amazed to learn that the Enron scandal was predictable and inevitable.

The Smartest Guys in the Room shows how Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling imploded Enron in just two years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_Guys_in_the_Room.

Wall Street and the finance industry still marches to their own tune.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

The Agent Who Intruded on a Pennant Race

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