sports agents

Ethics Dunce: Fox Sports Radio host Doug Gottlieb

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I’ve been somewhat remiss in my coverage of baseball ethics in recent months; its been like Sauce Bearnaise Syndrome: the Red Sox have been having such a nauseating season that even thinking about baseball has been painful. This story broke through my wall of pain because it also pings my legal ethics alarms.

Back on June 29 (before the Red Sox turned into mud, in fact),  Fox Sports Radio host Doug Gottlieb tweeted that LA Dodger Freddie Freeman’s agent, Casey Close, never communicated a contract offer that the Braves had made to free agent Freeman last winter before Freeman left the team he had always played on to sign with the Dodgers. Freeman was upset about the report; the Braves, and the Atlanta fans were also outraged, because Freeman was a popular and superb player for the Braves. Casey Close, however, was more upset than all of them combined. Not communicating a contract offer to a client is a throbbing neon ethics violation for a sports agent (it would lead to suspension of a law license if a lawyer did it) and Gottlieb’s claim could ruin Close’s career if it couldn’t be disproved. Close sued Gottlieb for defamation in July. Continue reading →

Stupid Unethical Reporter Tricks

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

If true, what Sports Illustrated reporter Jon Heyman is being accused of by his colleagues is a major ethics breach. The context—a free agent baseball star’s negotiation with teams competing with each other for his services—is a narrow one, but it challenges us to ponder how often the same dishonesty occurs in other news reporting contexts. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Former NFL agent Josh Luchs

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
“That night I sat in my hotel room making a list of pros and cons in my head. Sure, it was breaking NCAA rules, but I would be helping Kanavis out. How would I feel if my mom was sick and I didn’t have money to help her? I went through this for hours and finally decided to do it. The next morning I went to the bank, pulled out some of my bar mitzvah money, $2,500 in cash, showed up at Kanavis’s door and told him, “Kanavis, I gave this a lot of thought, and I want to help you out. I know how I would feel if it was my mom.”

—Former registered NFL player agent Josh Luchs, describing to Sports Illustrated one of thirty incidents in which he gave money to college players to persuade them to sign up as clients.
………..
Yes, if it was Luchs’s mom, and he thought he could con an agent into handing over illicit cash using her as an excuse, he might have tried this too. Thus do we see how a profession that is faced with many ethical dilemmas is completely unprepared to apply even rudimentary ethics analysis to come to a correct decision. Luchs frames his dilemma to make him out to be a good guy, but what he was actually doing is exploiting a college kid’s personal problems to reel him in, breaking NCAA rules on the way and jeopardizing the player’s career. Did Luchs explain that accepting the money might lead to sanctions for both the player and his college? Apparently not. More importantly, Luchs wasn’t giving money to the athlete to help his family out; he was giving the money as the quid in an implied quid pro quo arrangement: “I help your mother, you sign with me. Deal?” Continue reading →

Agent Scott Boras’s Conflicts Surface Again

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Last year, almost to the day, I posted an article on “The Hardball Times” site arguing that baseball super-agent Scott Boras, an attorney, frequently has client conflicts of interest that violate the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct. You can read it here. Now the issue has surfaced again, in relation to the problems Boras has had finding a satisfactory contract for Johnny Damon, a left-fielder, while he also represents other left-fielders competing with Damon for the same job.

I believe he has serious conflicts of interest as both an agent and as a lawyer. The two articles lay it all out; maybe my small cry in the wilderness is beginning to have some effect.

Stay tuned.