History of the Sports Agent

Originally published in 1910 (with a second, revised edition in 1911), The National Game by Alfred H. Spink is the first important history of baseball, predating Albert G. Spalding's better-known America's National Game by a year. Dedicating the first edition, Spink spells out his lofty goal: "I want this book to live forever, so that the names of those who helped to build up and make base ball the greatest of outdoor sports may never be forgotten". That goal was postponed, however, as Spink's The National Game has been out of print since 1911. While Spalding comes down firmly on the side of the owners, telling how the courageous and honest magnates triumphed morally over greedy and crooked players, Spink celebrates the accomplishments of the great players who helped to bring the game into the prominence it enjoyed in the first decade of the twentieth century. Spink provides a history of baseball before 1910; position-by-position biographies of former players and of every major league player of that era; sketches of managers, magnates, journalists, and umpires; the lineup of every championship team from 1871 to 1910; and a complete record of all games played for championships from 1884 to the 1910 World Series. In his foreword, Steven P. Gietschier, director of historical records at The Sporting News, details Spink's career as a St. Louis journalist and as secretary and press agent for the St. Louis Browns until he left the team to start a weekly newspaper devoted entirely to sports: "The Sporting News, eight pages long, hit the streets for the first time on St. Patrick's Day, 1886". Spink left The Sporting News to write for the theater, achieving little success. In addition to TheNational Game, he wrote the three-volume Spink Sport Stories: 1000 Big and Little Ones in 1921. The 1911 edition reprinted here features nearly two hundred black-and-white photographs.

Professional baseball players have always been well paid. In 1869, Harry Wright paid his Cincinnati Red Stockings about seven times what an average working-man earned. Today, on average, players earn more than fifty times the average worker's salary. In fact, on December 12, 1998, pitcher Kevin Brown agreed to a seven-year, $105,000,000 contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the first nine-figure contract in baseball history. Brown will be earning over $400,000 per game; more than 17,000 fans have to show up at Dodger Stadium every night just to pay his salary. Why are baseball players paid so much money? In this insightful book, legal scholar and salary arbitrator Roger Abrams tells the story of how a few thousand very talented young men obtain their extraordinary riches. Juggling personal experience and business economics, game theory and baseball history, he explains how agents negotiate compensation, how salary arbitration works, and how the free agency "auction" operates. In addition, he looks at the context in which these systems operate: the players' collective bargaining agreement, the distribution of quality players among the clubs, even the costs of other forms of entertainment with which baseball competes. Throughout, Dean Abrams illustrates his explanations with stories and quotations -- even an occasional statistic, though following the dictum of star pitcher, club owner, and sporting goods tycoon Albert Spalding, he has kept the book as free of these as possible. He explains supply and demand by the cost of a bar of soap for Christy Mathewson's shower. He illustrates salary negotiation with an imaginary case based on Roy Hobbs, star of The Natural. He leads the readerthrough the breath-taking successes of agent Scott Boras to explain the intricacies of free agent negotiating.

Sports agent - A sports agent is a person who, for a fee, procures and negotiates employment and endorsement deals for an athlete. In addition, the agent often handles public relations matters for his or her client.

David Frost (sports agent) - David Frost is a former sports agent who was the target of a murder-for-hire plot by his client, St. Louis Blues forward Mike Danton.

Sports Car International Top Sports Cars - Sports Car International magazine compiled a list of the Top Sports Cars of the last few decades. While the selection was simply the opinion of the magazine's editors, the list is a remarkable one in that it presents an excellent starting point for any sports car enthusiast to learn about the history of such cars.

historyofthesportsagent

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