ESPN’s Buster Olney recently chatted with baseball agent Jamie Murphy of TWC Sports on his Baseball Tonight podcast.
Notes from the podcast:
- Murphy represents Nick Markakis, Mark Ellis, David Aardsma and others.
- Murphy currently lives in Vermont.
- Murphy is the father of two little boys.
- About living in Vermont, Murphy said, “this day and age, you can work from anywhere, so we’re trying.”
- How did Murphy get into the agent business? He went to law school at Boston College and represented a few players in the Canadian Football League to get some experience. He managed to turn that into an internship at an agency. He says it did take him a while to get his career going. “I didn’t want to be a lawyer, I wanted to be a sports agent.”
- Murphy said that in any sport, a young agent should lean on the players’ association for assistance.
- The type of assistance from a players’ association varies. Murphy says that in a straight arbitration case, the players’ association is going to help, wants to be involved and needs to be involved.
- He said, “As an agent, you have a lot of information that you have to sort through.”
- Murphy says he typically waits for General Managers to reach out to him to talk about long term deals for clients.
- He describes himself as a very easygoing guy.
- The longest negotiation he had was for Nick Markakis. The Orioles approached him about a year before a deal was reached.
- All of Murphy’s clients want to be educated on their negotiations. They sometimes want updates two-to-three times per day.
- Murphy says he works more off of referrals at this point of his career, but admits that he used to be a fairly aggressive recruiter. For him, aggressive meant a handful of guys per year. Now he does not reach out to more than two-to-three guys per year.
- Murphy says there seems to be a lot more players changing agents and client stealing in basketball and football. He believes it is not nearly as big of a problem in baseball and thinks that oftentimes players leave inexperienced agents for more experienced ones.
