You may have missed the New York Mets signing of Alex Cora, "well-regarded backup infielder." Or perhaps you didn't recognize the name as anyone who has done anything of consequence in baseball over the past decade. But you still looked him up and noticed the lifetime .245 average and 34 career home runs, and then got upset for wasting so much time on "Alex friggin' Cora" and decided, eh, that's not news and decided you would block him out of your mind forever.
But blogs are here to remind you of news, and give you the nitty-gritty scoop, and in this case the water cooler scuttlebutt is that this Alex Cora character is represented by, get this, Scott Boras. The same man who represents must-have starter Oliver Perez! Now the plot thickens.
See, this opens the possibility that the Cora signing is not just about giving Jerry Manuel a solid versatile veteran infielder, but also about planting a Mind-Bomb in the brain of Boras. A bomb that explodes serotonin, making the normally contentious superagent rather amenable to passive-aggressive low-ball offers of, say, three years, 30 million for Ollie.
Of course Cora is not signed to play an important baseball role for the Mets; he's been signed to serve as a $2 million box of chocolates! An offering of a man-slave to appease Boras, the Greek God of Free Agency. Why else would you pay Cora that much, and then watch David Eckstein sign for $850 thousand with the San Diego Padres?
These are the levels of psychological depths that Mets GM Omar Minaya must manage, generally, in order to succeed at the highest levels; the layers peel back like an onion. And if Minaya's sacrifice doesn't help land Ollie, it could make Mets fans cry like one also.
