License to Deal: A Review of Jerry Crasnick's Book
Baseball fans are living in a matrix. The world of baseball they know is not real. It is an illusion that has been created in the image of what fans would like baseball to be but it is as phony as a thousand dollar bill.
In the real baseball world, players play for themselves, everyone's primary concern is to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible, players' agents influence teams in ways that have changed the game, fans are led to believe that teams and players care about them, and players are told that their teams are families that have their best interests at heart. Jerry Crasnick, in "License to Deal," takes readers where few fans have ever gone. The journey is disturbing because the truth is so different from the nonsense fans are given and accept without question.
The reader goes into the homes and minds of players that agents are recruiting, into the offices of agents and teams that are preparing for the annual players draft, and of greatest interest, into the clubhouses where the players let their defenses down. The rivalries between agents is described in detail, producing a picture that is not pretty.
Matt Sosnick runs a small baseball agency in San Francisco. Sosnick and his partner, Paul Cobbe, allowed Crasnick into their lives. Sosnick is a wheeler-dealer who wants people to like him. The reader gets to know Sosnick quite well, which will make most readers wonder why, if Sosnick wants to be thought of in positive terms, he does the things he does?
The large agencies try to steal players from the smaller ones like Sosnick's and from each other. Crasnick writes that Sosnick is repulsed by the predatory nature of his "profession," but he is not repulsed enough to leave it. After the 2003 season, Sosnick stole a player from another agent. He justified his actions because his rival had taken one his players a few years earlier. Sosnick told Crasnick that "After that, everything is open game." It is a game to which few fans are privy.
Who runs a baseball team? A seemingly simple query that in the 1950s would produce a simple response. Why, the manager runs the team. "License to Deal" shatters that myth as well as most of the others that most fans want to believe. Jerry Crasnick details an aspect of today's game that others mention only in passing. Through Sosnick, Crasnick educates the reader about the business of baseball, and it is not an easy education to accept because by accepting it, one must give up the myths one has grown to know and love since childhood.
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