Baseball insiders have long thought of super-agent Scott Boras as the industry's Darth Vader. To general managers, he's the guy with blood dripping from his teeth, trying to hijack every last penny for his clients. To the players he represents, Boras is a godsend, the guy who's going to get them the most money possible.  Is it a fair assessment? The numbers for last season say yes. Of the $311 million teams paid to 37 Boras clients in 2010, $69.1 million was essentially a waste--money spent over and above the players' collective worth. A waste for the teams, but great for Boras' employers, the players.  Leading the overpaid list in the Boras stable: Cardinals' pitcher Kyle Lohse, who turned in a 4-8 record and 6.55 earned run average last year while making $8.8 million. Other Boras clients whose performances didn't live up to their pay included Rays first-baseman Carlos Peña (.196 batting average; $10.1 million) and Red Sox outfielder J.D. Drew (.255 batting average; $14 million).  In Pictures: The Baseball Agents Who Rip Off Teams The Most  By definition, the best agents are those who compel teams to waste the most money. To identify who they are, we compared players' salaries against their productivity as measured by Baseball Prospectus' Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) score, which uses myriad stats to calculate a player's contribution to winning games over and above a minimum-salaried replacement player. (Pena's 2.9 VORP, for example, didn't rate too far above the expected production of a $400,000 rookie; our analysis suggests that $8.1 million of his $10.1 million salary was essentially a waste.) Each player's production vs. pay is compared to the average in his service class.  We limited the field to players earning at least $1 million a year, since younger, pre-arbitration players' salaries are pretty much dictated to them within a tight range. We separated out those whose service time (at least six seasons) passes the free agent threshold from those whose service time (three to five years) qualifies them for salary arbitration but not free agency. Service time is a big distinction: a post-arbitration, pre-free agent player cost the average team $178,012 per VORP point last season. For those who passed free agent eligibility, the cost jumped to $534,318 per point.  Example: Giants pitcher and Boras client Barry Zito. Based on his respectable 4.15 earned run average and 184 hits allowed in 199 innings, he turned in a decent VORP of 21.9 last year. At an average of $534,318 a point for Zito's service class, that 21.9 should have cost the Giants $11.7 million. But they paid Zito $18.5 million, overpaying him by almost $7 million.  An underpaid player: Florida shortstop Hanley Ramirez put up an excellent VORP of 55.8 in 2010. As a pre-free agent player going into 2010, Ramirez belonged to a service class that cost $178,012 per point, on average. His $7 million salary came in well under the $9.9 million the Marlins should have expected to pay for his production.  Dividing up the 385 players by the agents who represent them, we added up the relative underpayments and overpayments to determine which agents' stables are delivering the least value to their teams.
It's not just hype--the 2010 season demonstrates how Scott Boras is the best at squeezing every penny for his players.