The Boras effect: How often do Scott Boras clients change teams in free agency?

We're just a couple of weeks away from another MLB offseason, and as he usually does, Scott Boras promises to loom over the proceedings. Unlike last winter, Boras doesn't represent the clear top player on the market — outfielder Kyle Tucker is represented by Casey Close of Excel Sports Management, one of the major non-Boras Corp. firms around — but with names like Cody Bellinger, Alex Bregman, Pete Alonso, Ranger Suarez and Zac Gallen on his roster (not to mention arguably the best pitcher on the planet in Tarik Skubal, entering his contract year in 2026), the Hot Stove will once again run through baseball's preeminent superagent.

Which, naturally, has led to much consternation from fan bases around the league. Over years of securing top dollar for his clients, Boras has developed quite the reputation; once he gets his hooks into one of your team's best players, you can kiss any hope of a contract extension goodbye, and good luck retaining them once they hit the open market. And to be sure, Boras is extremely good at his job, and he'll seldom if ever allow one of his clients to leave money on the table for the sake of long-term security or a hometown discount.

But how accurate is that reputation, really? We wanted to find out, so we dove back into the deals he's negotiated over the last few offseasons to see how often his players stayed and went. The results were ... well, let's just say Mets and Red Sox fans shouldn't be getting their hopes up.

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Scott Boras history: How often do his clients actually change teams in free agency?

2024-25

*Denotes contract extension

Record: Four leave, two stay, one extension

Boras reestablished himself at the top of baseball's food chain this past winter, when he landed Juan Soto a historic 15-year, $765 million deal with the New York Mets. But that was hardly the extent of his offseason: He also helped guide Corbin Burnes and Blake Snell to nine-figure deals and negotiated a healthy extension for Matt Chapman in San Francisco.

His pursuits of big contracts for both Alex Bregman and Pete Alonso were less successful, with Bregman settling for a short-term, high-AAV deal with Boston and Alonso eventually being browbeaten into accepting what amounted to a one-year deal to return to the Mets. This is going to become something of a theme: While Boras clients returning to their previous teams isn't totally unheard of, it does tend to coincide with players whose markets aren't the hottest. Give him a great walk year or an in-demand player, and things get awfully dicey, as we saw with Soto, Snell and Burnes.

2023-24

*Denotes contract extension

Record: Three leave, one stays, one extension

Case in point: The 2023-24 offseason, in which the much-ballyhooed (and much-mocked) "Boras Four" all lingered on the market into spring training and in some cases beyond. (One of the four, Jordan Montgomery, was so disappointed that he even dumped Boras as his agent and publicly criticized him on his way out the door.)

Of course, in hindsight this seems most likely an aberration: Snell was coming off a Cy Young season but came with reasons why teams wouldn't want to pay him quite as such, while Cody Bellinger had one good year with the Cubs after flaming out in spectacular fashion with the Dodgers. Snell and Chapman switched teams, but Bellinger is proof that it's a lot easier to retain your Boras client when the bidding for him is a bit cooler. And Altuve's extension is proof that he does in fact listen when a player he represents communicates a desire to stay where he's at. (Looking at you, Tarik Skubal.)

2022-23

Record: Four leave, one stays

Boras was really, really cooking with gas here. The Bogaerts deal felt outrageous at the time, more than a decade for a player whose batted-ball metrics had already begun to decline, while Correa was coming off a previous foray into free agency in which supposedly sketchy medicals scuttled a deal with the Giants. Heck, even Brandon Nimmo got the bag, despite a demonstrated inability to stay healthy while playing center field.

But the unifying thread is that all of them were coming off of very strong seasons, and so Boras was able to work his magic. Almost invariably, that meant sending them to the highest bidder elsewhere. The lone exception was Nimmo, and that felt more like the Mets desperate to keep a beloved home-grown player in a bid for new relevancy early in the Steve Cohen era than anything else. Unless you've got an owner with historically deep pockets, good luck.

2021-22

Record: Seven leave, zero stay

A clean sweep! All of Boras' major clients in the winter of 21-22 left for hefty deals elsewhere, highlighted by the Rangers shelling out for Seager and Semien and the Cubs allowing the Rockies to overpay for an obviously-in-decline Kris Bryant. This could also serve as a road map for players like Alonso and Bregman: A year after settling for short-term deals with high AAVs, both Rodon and Correa found the contracts they were looking for after one more strong season.

2020-21

*Denotes contract extension

For obvious reasons, the post-2020 offseason was a quiet one around the league. But it is worth noting that Boras was able to secure a healthy extension for McCullers, who returned from injury looking largely like his old self. Needless to say, that one hasn't quite worked out the way the Astros hoped.

2019-20

Record: Five leave, one stays

Ah, we've finally arrived: the Winter of Boras, in which he forged his current reputation over the span of just a couple of weeks that saw his players rake in close to a billion dollars in free agency. It's telling that, in his most successful offseason, five of Boras' six biggest contracts came from other teams — and the one that didn't required the Nationals to completely blow the pitching market out of the water for a player in Stephen Strasburg whose lengthy injury history had (correctly) given the rest of the league some pause.

Teams in New York, L.A. and Toronto all had cash to burn, and as always, Boras is going to help route his players to the high bidder (provided that said bidder hits a number that he and the player aren't confident they can clear in a year's time). And if your team is set to lose a good-not-great player coming off a strong season but who might not necessarily age well, say your goodbyes now.

2018-19

Technically this is outside our purview, but I still wanted to throw it in for fun. Like Soto after him, Harper turned down multiple advances from the Nationals before hitting free agency. And like Soto after him, he would eventually bolt for an NL East rival on a then-record contract (until Mike Trout's extension topped it 19 days later, this was the richest deal in MLB history). It's not out of the question for players to retain Boras clients. But it is awfully difficult: He's going to get all of his players top dollar, and he'll have zero sentimentality when doing so.