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MLB Players Performance Analysis Sports Agents

Clocking In Some Overtime Work For Naught?

Clemens squirting OswaltRandy and Alan Hendricks have a very solid baseball agency in Hendricks Sports Management. While they seem to not publicly list their client sheet on their website, they definitely do not hold back from promoting the fact that Roger Clemens is a Hendricks client. And after Clemens has been bashed by his longtime trainer, Brian McNamee, the Hendricks brothers have not backed away from fully representing their most prized client. Instead of letting Clemens’ personal attorney and public relations manager clear up Roger’s name, Randy Hendricks and a couple of associates at the agency have realized their fiduciary duty and done something to help their client in a situation where his name could be tarnished for life.

Earlier this week, the group released an 18,000 word statistical report (click here for the report) in an effort to show that with gained experience and knowledge, Clemens was able to improve his game, and that his strong performance was in no way caused by taking performance enhancers. ESPN relates the report, which contains 38 charts, to a salary arbitration case.

I have two general observations after reading the report.

  1. The Hendricks team put together an impressive package in a short amount of time. Nice reaction speed.
  2. However, this report does absolutely nothing to make me think that Clemens is any more innocent than before I downloaded it. It shows that it is possible to be productive as a 40 year old (especially with lower pitch counts), but does not tell me why this means that Clemens’ performance is not related to taking performance enhancers. Just because it is possible to be a stellar 40 year old pitcher (I did not need a report to tell me this) without taking steroids does not mean that Clemens necessarily falls into that category.

I am not quite sure what this report proved other than that Clemens performed really well in his career. But didn’t we all know this anyway?

By Darren Heitner

Darren Heitner created Sports Agent Blog as a New Year's Resolution on December 31, 2005. Originally titled, "I Want To Be A Sports Agent," the website was founded with the intention of causing Heitner to learn more about the profession that he wanted to join, meet reputable individuals in the space and force himself to stay on top of the latest news and trends.

Heitner now runs Heitner Legal, P.L.L.C., which is a law firm with many practice areas, including sports law and contract law. Heitner has represented numerous athletes and sports agents as legal counsel. He has also served as an Adjunct Professor at Indiana University Bloomington from 2011-2014, where he created and taught a course titled, Sport Agency Management, which included subjects ranging from NCAA regulations to athlete agent certification and the rules governing the profession. Heitner serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where he teaches a Sports Law class that includes case law surrounding athlete agents and the NCAA rules.

3 replies on “Clocking In Some Overtime Work For Naught?”

When an Agent comes out with something like this, it immediately loses its credibility. Very few people in the public feel agents are honest, especially when making public statements, let alone a statistical analysis on one of their own clients.

What Hendricks Sports SHOULD had done was hire an independent third party to run the exact same analysis on their client. This way, it has at least some credibility. Just a thought.

I don’t doubt the veracity of the numbers. Anyone can look those up so I wouldn’t see the incentive to lie.

But what I don’t get is what this proves, if anything. Like Darren said, so what if he performed well later in his career, along with guys like Schilling and Johnson. But doesn’t that fact just increase the likelihood that he was “supplementing” on the side to keep his body going?

An agent rarely loses credibilty when standing up for a client. Whether they do the anaylis themselves or PAY a 3rd party it doesn’t matter. Hendricks PAYING somebody is really no more credible than doing it themselves.

Hendricks did this for the publicity of their firm. At this point, they have made just about all the money they can make off of Clemens. He is not playing anymore and his marketability is at an all time low. This was done as a marketing opportunity to help recruit new clients on the high school, college and professional levels. They were allowed to show everbody in detail how well they can research numbers when planning for arbitration or a contract extension.

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