Glavine gone because he wouldn’t defer big bucks
What really gets me is why Glavine thought that the Braves didn’t respond to his offer: his moron of an agent didn’t go into his office or check his messages for two days. Say what you want about Scott Boras, but do you think that would ever happen with him?
Something there doesn’t smell right. Greg Clifton is not the biggest fish in the sports agent market. One would assume that when negotiating his biggest client’s biggest deal, he would make all the teams aware of little things — like his cell phone number.
And on the other side, when the Braves, like the rest of us, read in the newspaper that Glavine is upset that there has been no response, don’t you think they could have called him and said “hey, we made an offer; talk to your agent to find out the details.”
Reading this gives me the “blame the agents” feeling. Glavine doesn’t want to burn the bridges with his old team for whom he probably still has positive feels. The Braves don’t want to say anything negative about a classy guy who was a key role on the best team Atlanta has ever had. So everyone can blame Clifton. The agent, for his share of the deal, gets to look like an ass regardless of the actual facts.
I totally agree. The deal got played out in the press so much that both parties were compelled to answer questions about its details, and Clifton got stuck in the middle. He should get duly compensated for that, and I don’t doubt he was.
I just don’t buy that, though. The Braves weren’t playign things out in the press at all. They were keeping quiet. Only Glavine and Clifton were playing things out in the press.
It seems entirely plausible to me that something got messed up here. I don’t see why Glavine would feel the need to assist in making up some story to help cover Schuerholz’s ass. And let’s face it, it was a ridiculous charge by Glavine to begin with – whining to the press about the Braves’ not having gotten back to them when barely 24 hours had passed since the proposal had gone out.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Glavine isn’t the heroic great guy I always thought. After reading the details of the negotiations, it turns out that Clifton’s cell phone mailbox was full when Schuerholz called it. This was just before Glavine was to go to Philly and NY. Before that, Glavine was reportedly “positive about getting somethign done, before the Philly/NY trip”. Because of the full cell phone mailbox, they never got to meet before the trip. When the final meeting took place, they all went in agreeing that if they couldn’t get it done that day, that would be it. During the 6-hour meeting, Schuerholz and Kasten offered the same thing as the Mets and Phils, but asked Glavine to defer some of the money to help with the payroll. Glavine’s mercenary, self-serving reaction was a “no” that will resound for years to come through the halls at The Ted. I guess he can’t afford to lose a bit of value from his tens of millions.