Boras and his client Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees’ third baseman, whom he has made the top-grossing athlete in team sports. MARK ULRIKSEN

Scott Boras has season tickets to see the Dodgers, the Angels, the Padres, the Giants, and the A’s—a full California sweep. In Los Angeles and Anaheim, he also maintains luxury boxes, but, for the most part, wherever he goes he sits, or sometimes stands, in one of the first few rows directly in back of home plate, cell phone at his ear. Boras represents baseball players—among them the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez (A-Rod), the top-grossing athlete in team sports, Barry Zito, the beneficiary of the largest pitching contract ever signed, and the Mets’ Carlos Beltran. Before a game, players will tend to approach the backstop and, in Boras’s telling, thank him for the work he does on their behalf. They needn’t even be his clients. (Ballplayers are firm believers in trickle-down economics.) Groundskeepers, umpires, and reporters, too, regularly drop by to pay their respects, trading anecdotes for scoops and the feeling of proximity to power. They shake his hand—fingers poking through the protective netting—without quite getting a firm grip.

To the extent that lay people still find it offensive when baseball players command salaries equivalent to those of movie stars and underperforming hedge-fund managers, Boras is a convenient bogeyman, and at every ballpark there are bound to be a few hecklers who let him know it. He was brought up Catholic, and, as he told a newspaper reporter earlier this year, “Being Catholic, who you are as a person, you don’t appreciate any association with Satan.” Still, there is a devilish turn to his smile—a glint of righteous defiance—and if there is a popular association that genuinely troubles him it is more likely that of Jerry Maguire, the smooth-talking Tom Cruise character, whom he does not at all resemble. Maguire is an agent. Boras is an attorney—a master of fine print, not histrionics. You won’t find him in a bar with his clients (he prefers the working breakfast), or pleading with them in the locker-room showers. He wears his thinning brown hair combed perfectly across his scalp, left to right, and his clothes are overdeliberate California casual: pressed jeans, polo shirt fully buttoned. Spontaneity has not recently occurred to him. Out of superstition, or some symbolic show of authenticity, he has carried the same beat-up leather satchel for years.

“People call me from the outside world all the time—they want me to negotiate everything,” Boras says, with a hint of irritation. “I’m not the person who will go out and negotiate anything, at any time, for anyone who happens to wear some sort of uniform.” He regards his nominal colleagues—the three hundred-odd agents who have been certified by the Major League Baseball Players Association, and many of whom represent athletes in several sports—as glorified valets. “You have to distinguish between someone who has a sales personality versus someone who is substantive, and has a form of legal practice representing individuals who just happen to play a singular sport, baseball,” he says. Like a celebrity criminal-defense attorney, Boras serves his rich and cosseted clientele with a high-minded sense of purpose, and he has little use for the notion that his tenacity as an advocate is a reflection of soulless greed. (An old baseball acquaintance of his, George Kissell, likes to joke that only eight people will attend Boras’s funeral—“and all eight will be pallbearers.”) In fact, Boras is a moralist—he sometimes calls himself the only Democrat in Orange County—and prone to lecture about capitalism and education and the larger meaning of it all. (“I see grand houses of symphonies and performing-arts centers and such, which is great for a community to have, but on the other hand I walk four blocks away and I see a run-down school and I’m wondering, Where are our priorities?”) When he talks about baseball, he likes to diagnose the state of the game. “We have no leadoff hitters anymore,” he once told me, laying part of the blame on veiled racial discrimination by the N.C.A.A. And, “The eradication of steroids is, frankly, not that noticeable.”

Last December, at Baseball America’s annual banquet, Boras was named the game’s most influential non-player in the twenty-five years since the magazine began publishing, beating out the current Major League Baseball commissioner, Bud Selig, who had recently declared the sport to be in its “golden age,” as well as Don Fehr, the longtime head of the Players Association. (The most influential player was Barry Bonds, who is a former Boras client, and similarly regarded.) “I could kind of feel in the room that it was, like, ‘What is this? Why is this guy up here? We’re baseball people,’ ” Boras recalls. The banquet is traditionally a feel-good event for management types, with a charitable focus and an emphasis on youth coaching and mentorship. Boras took the stage and delivered a sermon on economics. “What I told them all was: ‘You know what this business is about, guys? We’ve gone from, when I came into it, an industry that made, economically, about five hundred million dollars, and we went to a billion in 1990. We went to three billion in 2000. And now we’re near six billion in 2007. What it says for all of us in this room is this: We’re doing a good job with the game. We’re growing the game, as it should be grown. There’s a balance that’s needed in the growing of the game, and I provide the balance on one side, and you provide it on the other.’”

The applause was tepid. “You just wanted to crawl behind the curtain,” a Baseball America contributor told me. One National League manager considered walking out, in protest. And yet influence, however coolly embraced, can be infectious. Boras, who is fifty-four, seems to have become impatient with mere balance-provision. This spring, he mailed a letter to Commissioner Selig, in which he outlined a proposal to alter the format of the game’s most sacred ritual, the World Series. Why not make it nine games, instead of seven, he argued, and hold those extra two games—the first two games—at a neutral site? Cities all over the nation, or even the world, could compete for the honor of playing host, as with the Olympics. “It’s a fact that our game needs a forum that’s akin to the Super Bowl,” Boras explained to me not long after he’d sent the letter. “People don’t go to the Super Bowl for the game. Most Super Bowl games are not competitive, or good games. They go there for the event. They go there for the three-day weekend.” He described a vision of “corporate hospitality,” including a “gala, like the Oscars,” during which the M.V.P. and Cy Young awards, among others, would be announced, with all the finalists present and on view, and presumably walking the red carpet in sponsored menswear. Who could argue against such a change? It would mean more money for the owners, more “marketable content” for the media to broadcast, more attention for the stars—more everything.

“He takes himself very seriously,” Fay Vincent, the former commissioner, said recently of Boras. “I’m not surprised that he’s beginning to make grandiose suggestions.” Vincent added that he thought this particular World Series suggestion was “preposterous,” and, giving voice to a common complaint of fans and players alike, he said, “I mean, the season goes on endlessly as it is.”