Jayson Werth blasts former agent Scott Boras: Teams 'didn’t know that I wanted to play'
Fifteen years into his Major League career, Jayson Werth wanted to keep going – but he nonetheless retired in June.
He was on a minor league contract with the Mariners at the time, but had suffered a hamstring injury, and no one was optimistic that he’d make it back to the majors. But it didn’t have to end that way.
Werth went on the Howard Eskin Podcast Tuesday, revealing that MLB teams were interested in him as recently as November 2017. So what happened between then and Spring Training 2018? Literally nothing, according to Werth.
“I had offers in November, and I was advised by my former agent to wait; ill-advised, I guess,” Werth said.
So come the middle of Spring Training, Werth took matters into his own hands. He personally called every team, except one: The Mets. Werth apparently preferred to face retirement than play for his long-time division rival.
“I wouldn’t play for the Mets.”
Did Scott Boras fail to market Jayson Werth?
But one of the perks of being a famous professional athlete is that someone is supposed to handle your business. And for Werth, that someone would have been his agent, the all-powerful Scott Boras. Long story short, Boras is no longer his agent.
“Some guys were surprised to hear from me – they didn’t know that I wanted to play. Which was surprising, because I wanted to play,” Werth explained. “I let my agent know I wanted to play. And they said they either hadn’t heard from him, hadn’t heard from me, just didn’t know that I was available. So that’s one of the reasons why I’m no longer with that agent.”
Boras, of course, was largely credited as responsible for the slow free agent market following the 2017 season. He represents a number of the sport’s biggest stars, and advised many of last year’s free agents – including J.D. Martinez, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Jake Arrieta, and Greg Holland – to wait out the market through Spring Training, if necessary.
While the tactic worked at least somewhat better for the aforementioned players, by all appearances, Jayson Werth’s career was a casualty of Boras’ methods.
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