“All right, I’ll let you know how it goes after.” I hung up with Jenny.
I strode up Yawkey Way next to Fenway Park. It was always hard to return to Boston. I’d obliterated my elbow while we were playing Boston College. I’d always loved the city before then. Regardless, Fenway was a cathedral, and stadiums like this reminded me that I was still connected to the game.
I’d gone over Jenny’s notes on the flight. It was like she knew exactly what I was looking for. Every number was in the right place and easy to read. Valuing baseball players wasn’t an easy task. It was tough to find signals within the noise. At the end of the day it all broke down into one statistic, WAR, wins above replacement. Boston had a robust sabermetrics group. Many clubs were on a revenue-driven model versus a run-driven model. It was about how many dollars the player could bring in for merchandising, endorsements, ticket sales. Boston was about winning, so it was tough to sell them on the economics beyond what happened on the field.
I walked into the office with the general manager and his assistant. Before they sat down, I got right to it.
“A hundred and twenty mil over eight years, weighted of course with injury riders, etcetera. That’s the offer we’re after.” I grinned my ass off at the silver-haired bastard sitting at his desk.
Negotiations were war, and he was the enemy. Once the papers were signed, we could be friends again.
He looked over at the assistant GM and turned back to me. His eyebrow quirked up a second. Something was off. It wasn’t right. My gut told me if he made a counter that I should rescind the original offer, but I’d been over Jenny’s work. Not as thoroughly as I normally would, but it was perfect. I trusted those fucking numbers.
“That’s a little more than we were thinking, Ethan. How about one ten?”
Salvatore was a poor kid from the Dominican Republic. He’d have been happy with a tenth of this contract. I always asked for more than we wanted. Truth be told, a hundred million was our bottom. Jenny and I had just earned the agency an extra one point five million dollars.
“Let me check with my client.” I dialed up Salvatore. “Hey, you good with one ten?”
Raucous cheers from the phone were so damn loud everyone in the room could hear. I had to move the phone away from my ear. “I think that’s a yes.”
We all smiled and shook hands. Champagne was brought in and we toasted and drank. It was a good fucking day, yet, I’d ignored my gut. I never did that, ever.
After a much longer than necessary delay at Logan, where I chatted with Jenny on the phone for most of the time, we finally boarded. Halfway through the flight, I reached up for my bag from the overhead compartment.
I had to look at the data one more time. Something wasn’t right. They’d known something I didn’t in that room, and there’s no bigger fear for a sports agent than not having all of the information during a negotiation—someone else having the upper hand.
Page after page I flipped and read with the same minute detail I usually did. As they announced our descent, there it was. A mistake. Small on the page but huge overall. The numbers were calculated for a player with a past injury. Salvatore was in prime condition, having never suffered anything more than minor scrapes and bruises.
Fuck! Fuck!
Sports analysts had said he was worth ten million a year, tops. They estimated an eighty-million-dollar deal would be a good price, but that I’d probably get him ninety. This goddamn mistake cost us a good ten million dollars with the rough math I did in my head. They knew it in the room too. They used the same type of models and had the same type of actuaries who specialized in baseball players.
The money we’d given up would’ve covered the salaries in Jenny’s department for the next ten years. The money we lost for Salvatore could’ve been used for anything. Knowing him he would’ve rebuilt shit in the Dominican Republic or given half of it to charity.
I wanted to rip the fucking plane apart, and yet I was stuck in a goddamn aluminum tube for another twenty minutes. The plane had Wi-Fi and I shot Jenny a text.
We need to talk, asap. Plane lands in twenty minutes.
I jammed the phone back in my bag and didn’t wait for a response, because I didn’t know what I was capable of saying. How the fuck did she miss that?
I mean, I should’ve reviewed her work more thoroughly, but she was responsible. This wasn’t going to be good. It was why I didn’t get involved with people at work. It was why I didn’t date anyone in the industry. One ten was a good deal, but this type of deal came along once every fifty years. If I’d gotten Salvatore one twenty I’d have had every fucking player in the league knocking down my door, in multiple sports.
Jenny smiled and I blew past her toward the door. “Follow me.” It was all I said when I walked by.
She was wearing her usual out of work uniform only this time her shorts were khaki. Her footsteps pounded after me.
Before I could cross the street she gripped me by the arm and tried to turn me around. I yanked my arm away. “Not here.”
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
I shouldn’t have told her to meet me. I should’ve taken a cab and blown off some steam before messaging her. My mouth was a bomb waiting to go off. I whipped my head back, still facing forward, and sneered. “You.”
One word was all it took to turn her pale. She froze in her tracks and I took off across the street. I’d told her I wanted to talk, but after seeing her I didn’t want to talk. An apology is what she deserved, because I knew my word cut her deep. She wasn’t about to get one right now though.
I stomped off and hailed a cab in front of her. There was no way I could ride in a car with her after that. In the reflection of a window I could see her, clutching her hand over her mouth. It looked like she was crying into her palm.