License to Deal: A Season on the Run

Matt Sosnick co-runs a small California agency representing nine major league baseball players, including all-star pitcher Dontrelle Willis. Crasnick, a baseball writer for ESPN.com, spent months at Sosnick's side, watching him work with clients and try to sign up new prospects. -- Publisher's Weekly

The following is an excerpt from the book License to Deal: A Season on the Run With a Maverick Baseball Agent.

By Jerry Crasnick
Copyright © 2005 Jerry Crasnick

Chapter One

The road was dry, the sky was clear, and Dontrelle Willis hadn't had a drop of alcohol the day he should have died.

He'd just finished lunch and was headed north up Route 101 near Palo Alto, California, when he heard a bang coming from the right rear of his Ford Mustang. About a half-mile south of the Stanford University exit, Dontrelle felt his car drifting toward the right lane and instinctively yanked the steering wheel to the left to avoid a collision. But the fleeting instant for adjustment had already passed. The Mustang skidded northbound while facing west, then toppled on its side and flipped counterclockwise once, twice, three times before coming to rest beside the center divider, facing the oncoming traffic.

As a minor-league pitcher with the Florida Marlins, Dontrelle was accustomed to setting events in motion. Now, a random and inexplicable occurrence was hurling him down the highway at 65 mph. Buckled in his seat, he felt a sense of horror: his fate was out of his hands. He kept his eyes open through each flip, watched the front windshield shatter, and raised his arms and braced them against the roof of the car. "I don't want to die like this," he told himself. He felt a wet sensation on the back of his neck and later surmised that the radiator had sprung a leak. The scene unfolded with a sickening, slow-motion feel, yet it happened so quickly that there was barely time to pray.

The accident photographs are both grotesque and surreal. They show a green mass of metal propped on its side, so mangled you can barely discern that it's a car, much less a Ford Mustang. As Dontrelle shimmied out the busted back window onto the asphalt, he looked at his vehicle. The hood was gone and the windshield was but a memory. Traffic was passing by so quickly on Route 101 that another car nearly struck him on the highway's shoulder. His blue-and-white polo shirt was stained with some sort of fluid. He later chose to keep the shirt as a memento, to remind him of how lucky he had been.

Dontrelle took a quick inventory, thanked God that he was in one piece, then pulled out his cellular phone. Who to call? His mother was at work, and she'd freak, he knew. So he dialed his agent's number.

"Dude, I've been in a bad accident," he said to Matt Sosnick. "Come get me."

Matt knew it was bad when he called the dispatcher and she told him that several motorists had already reported the accident. He jumped in his Jaguar and reached the scene in 20 minutes, only to find the off-ramp closed. So he drove down the embankment through the bushes, into a place no Jaguar XJ8 had gone before. Then he crossed several lanes onto the shoulder and wedged his way behind a parked police car.

Matt glanced at the traffic and saw passers-by making the sign of the cross. A California Highway Patrol officer later described the accident as "gnarly." Dontrelle was 100 percent, Grade A fine. But he emerged from his car in an almost trancelike state. He approached Matt with tears on his face, and they hugged each other so hard it hurt.

***

The baseball agent exists to negotiate contracts and provide round-the-clock babysitting services for millionaire big leaguers in need. He frets over your salary arbitration case and talks the hotel manager back to Earth after you've skipped out on the bill. The agent exudes an air of mystery: his profession is a marriage of romance and sleaze, and he's either a detail man, an opportunist, or both, depending on your vantage point. He works ridiculously long hours looking out for the best interests of his clients, or risks sleep deprivation hatching schemes to screw management out of every buck. Who knows what motivations race through his head behind that gelled hair and those designer shades? The agent is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, cloaked in a tailored Italian suit.

Matt Sosnick, who runs a growing baseball agency in suburban San Francisco, bats about .500 on stereotypes. "There are four things you need to know about me right away," he'll say, once he opens the passenger door to his Jaguar and you're ensconced in leather. "I live for the Dave Matthews Band. I've taped every Simpsons episode ever made. I don't have a crumb of food in my house. And I only sleep on sheets with a really high thread count."

Matt also owns several top-of-the-line suits that he buys from the Hong Kong tailors who pass through town every few weeks for private fittings. The suits are worth $3,000 apiece, but he purchases them for $800 to $900 each. He's proud of the price and quick to reveal the inner lining, where his name is stitched in fancy script. The suits help him look sharp on frequent trips to the heartland, where he sweeps in like a Texas twister to romance prospects who have 95-mph fastballs and personal relationships with the Lord Jesus Christ.

After all, a man has to make a nice first impression if he wants to make a living.

Matt seems perfectly tailored for his profession, with his flair for shrewd snap judgments and pathological need for action. He talks frequently and he talks fast, with a 10-item-or-less-checkout-line urgency more suited to, say, midtown Manhattan than his native northern California. But the glamour and money aren't what drive him, despite what his competitors say. Matt already has more money than your average bachelor around town would ever need. He's in the agent business for the sense of family it provides, and for the opportunity to play mother hen and surrogate father to a bunch of kids in need of guidance.

Matt and his partner, Paul Cobbe, determined several years ago that the barriers to entry in their profession required them to do more than negotiate draft bonuses and supply batting gloves and spikes to players. The competitive advantage, Paul calls it. Bigger, more established agencies could print slick brochures and crow about multimillion-dollar deals struck on behalf of marquee free agents. Mom-and-pop shops need a more personal touch. So Sosnick and Cobbe decided they wouldn't represent players as much as adopt them. They invest emotionally in their clients and are available for counsel on everything from money worries to girlfriend problems, regardless of the time of day. Their welcome mats are always out -- and extraordinarily worn.

Every now and then, the guest stays a while. In October 2002, Matt handed over a spare key to his duplex apartment to a minor-league pitcher named Dontrelle Willis. Four years into an improbable friendship, Matt and Dontrelle shared a 1,700-square-foot space and a life for several months. They broke down enough societal and generational barriers to bridge the gap from affluent Burlingame to hardscrabble west Alameda.

In the summer and fall of 2003, Dontrelle would make an all-star team, win the National League Rookie of the Year award, and become a national sensation as a pitcher for the world champion Florida Marlins. Only a handful of starters in the majors are black; even fewer big leaguers wear their caps askew and play the game with a sense of joy so pronounced, it's palpable. Dontrelle approaches life in a headfirst-slide sort of way, and his pitching motion is so contorted, it looks like a kinesiology experiment gone awry. No wonder fans were lining up for his autograph and a chance to be near him.

There weren't any cameras or reporters waiting to chronicle the event when Dontrelle, an aspiring Carolina Mudcat, moved into the spare room of Matt's $775,000 duplex near the airport in the fall of 2002. Logic would say that a 33-year-old Caucasian wheeler-dealer and a 20-year-old African-American male with street smarts and a gangsta vocabulary had no business cohabiting or bonding with any sense of permanence. Yet bond they did.

***

In his own way, Matt helped Dontrelle prepare for the season. He jostled the kid at 7:00 AM each day for training runs. They'd drive 10 minutes to the Crystal Springs reservoir, and if Matt found a parking place within three spots of the front gate, he knew it was destined to be a good day. The Sawyer Camp Trail is postcard pretty, enveloped in thick groves of oak, and every twist and turn can bring a surprise in the form of a rabbit or perhaps a deer crossing the path. Matt and Dontrelle would begin their runs beneath a blanket of fog, before the sun sliced through the chilly morning air, and they'd feel their hearts race to the accompaniment of heavy breathing. At 6'4" and 235 pounds, Dontrelle was too thick in the legs for serious distance running, but he was dogged enough to keep pace with his agent, who ran with a fervor bordering on desperation.

On many of the runs, Matt talked about world events and misery and strife in far-flung locations. One time, Dontrelle returned to his old neighborhood in Alameda and began rambling on about Pol Pot and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. His "people," as he likes to call them, looked at him as if he'd grown a second head.

Agent and player rubbed off on each other in ways you wouldn't expect. Dontrelle took things in stride and approached life with a sense of balance and perspective. He felt strongly that there was a time and place for work and a corresponding time and place for fun. He'd tilt his head with an admonishing look as Matt spent hour after hour on the cell phone doing business.

"He's crazy," Dontrelle says. "He doesn't stop working. He works until he sleeps. There's no leisure time. A lot of times I'd say, 'Hey, you gotta relax, dude.' He's a very important man. His M.O. is to be in control of everything because he's a smart guy. He's a very intelligent guy. He makes good decisions. Therefore, he feels responsible for everyone. He feels accountable for everyone. And it doesn't work like that. But you can't fault a man for that trait. That's a good trait. It's the same trait I have. I think that's why we connect."

The competitive advantage. Matt invited Dontrelle to his grandmother's house for Thanksgiving dinner and took his client to parties full of thirtysomething Jewish singles. Dontrelle would listen quietly and absorb as Matt's crowd discussed the hunt for Osama bin Laden or debated whether the term homicide bomber was preferable to suicide bomber. Then he'd chime in with a few opinions of his own.

Published by Rodale; June 2005; $24.95 US/$35.95 CAN; 1-59486-024-6

Reprinted from: "License to Deal: A Season on the Run with a Maverick Baseball Agent" by Jerry Crasnick. Copyright © 2005 Jerry Crasnick. Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. Available wherever books are sold or directly from the publisher by calling (800) 848-4735 or visit their website at RodaleStore.com.

Author

Jerry Crasnick, ESPN.com Baseball Insider, has covered the game since 1988, when he followed Pete Rose and the Reds as a beat reporter for the Cincinnati Post. He has since worked for the Denver Post and Bloomberg News and written columns for the Sporting News and Baseball America. He lives in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two daughters. "License to Deal" is his first book.