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........................................| 119 Outside Fenway Park at 5:30 on Sunday afternoon, June 5, business is booming. The highest ticket prices in the major leagues do little to dissuade the fans, who have filled the old ball yard for the 171st straight time, and now stream out wearing their souvenir T-shirts paying homage to Big Papi or Manny or Johnny Damon. They pour into the Cask’N Flagon, or hang out at Remdawg’s, belting out “Sweet Caroline.” Munching overpriced Cuban sandwiches from El Tiante, or sitting under green umbrellas and throwing back the beers, they toast the good times (another late win, 6–3, over the Angels) under a perfect blue sky, temperatures in the eighties, a breeze off the Charles, sparkling June light. Yeah, it is a business. It has always been a business. That’s why the Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees all those years ago. But it is a business predicated on passion , on what Sox owner John Henry calls “an affair of the heart.” Jim Masteralexis basks in the bustle. He sits with his buddy and fellow agent Steve McKelvey, sipping $6.50 cups of Bud Light and “marveling at the fabulous breasts of the young women of Boston.” Marveling at least until Lisa arrives. It was seventeen Junes earlier when they had met at Fenway on a steamy night for their first date, his Sox defeating her Yankees, 7–3. Now they are converging on the old ballpark once again. This time they’ve come for the New England College All-Star Game, a contest between top college prospects in the six-state area, slated for this evening after the Red Sox–Angels game. Jim and Lisa are now the parents of three kids, including two-year-old twins. They have been married for almost eleven years, but their agency, DiaMMond Management Group, dates back even further. In November 1992 they opened what was first called Sport Ventures International, attracting a couple of low-level minor leaguers, a few Canadian Football League players, and the top-ranked player on the International Racquetball Tour. By the time they added McKelvey, Lisa’s UMass sport management colleague, in 1998, they represented only baseball players, none of whom had yet made it to the bigs. Now, in June 2005, the business is still an uphill fight which DiaMMond Management tries to wage around the edges of Jim’s full-time job as 9 “They Got Him!” Pittsfield, Massachusetts 120 | chapter 9 a lawyer and Lisa and Steve’s as professors at UMass. Oftentimes they will be with a player for years and never see a penny. Their typical 4 percent commission doesn’t apply to minor league contracts, and minor leaguers are basically who they represent. They beat the bushes for top high school prospects, bend over backwards to bond with families, send out lots of topof -the-line baseball equipment, and set up image-boosting off-season baseball clinics in players’ hometowns. They visit players at spring training and occasionally on the road, paying for steak dinners and dispensing all kinds of behind-the-scenes counseling and legal advice. Once Jim tried—unsuccessfully—to persuade a woman who had slept with one of their clients in a Las Vegas hotel to return over $4,000 worth of clothing she had charged on the player’s credit card. Another time, Jim and Lisa took turns on the phone attempting to talk one of their clients into leaving his Independent League team and signing a Double-A contract they had arranged with the Montreal Expos. With the signing deadline just hours away, the client, Jaime Malave, told Lisa, “I’ll be honest with you—I haven’t gotten a sign yet from God that I should do this.” An exasperated Lisa scribbled a note to Jim: “We’ve lost this one. We’re competing with God.” But on this sparkling night at Fenway, the deity may be back on their side. The Major League Baseball draft is just two days away, and DiaMMond Management is sitting on a possible goldmine. They have one of the starting pitchers in tonight’s game, the top prospect in New England. In the most recent “Draft Tracker” published by Baseball America, Matt Torra of the University of Massachusetts was projected as the twentieth pick in the country, someone with “as much helium as any player in the draft.” ● Torra, a strapping six-foot-three right-hander, hails from the regrettably named...

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