Agent Book Falls Short

This book by first time author Jerry Crasnick is, at times, informative about the agent business but not in a real flattering way to its main protagonist, Matt Sosnick. Sosnick, a neophyte baseball agent, comes across more as a buddy than as an agent and all of his major clients, with the exception of Dontrelle Willis, seem to fire him when they realize they need an established agent. Hence, Crasnick focuses a great deal on client stealing, however this was the central theme of the superb film "Jerry McGuire." So, if your looking for an original idea, you won't find it here. In fact, the number of clients dumping Sosnick is rather voluminous and painful to read about. You feel like your reading less about a sports agent, and instead, watching an episode about teenage angst on "Dawson's Creek." One comes away feeling pity for Sosnick but not much else. At times, Crasnick seems to be running out of things to talk about.

Perhaps that's why Crasnick digresses from Sosnick and attempts to write a history about baseball agents instead, but here, the book loses focus. One gets the sense that Crasnick has attempted to model the book's "heroic figure," Sosnick, in a manner similar to how Michael Lewis made Billy Beane heroic in "Moneyball," but the analogy ends there. Crasnick is not the writter that Lewis is, and Sosnick doesn't come across as a hero, but rather as a modern day Falstaff or a wanna-be victim of the paparazzi. You're hoping for "The Beatles" but instead, you get "Herman's Hermits." Crasnick's book doesn't cover any new territory and this work falls short.

A Job that Looks Very Glamorous

After the movie Jarry Maguire the role of the sports agent became famous even though the movie was pure fiction. In reality, this is a business anyone can enter. There are no licensensing or special educational requirements.

In reality though, it isn't all that easy. How do you get started? How do you first find a promising young star and second, convince him that you can do as good a job as one of the bigger, much better known agencies? How do you even go about convincing the young athelete that you can do a better job for him than he can do for himself, and save your fees?

This is the story of Matt Sosnick, a west coast businessman who decides to change his career from the high tech industry to being a sports agent. For several months the author a baseball insider worked with Mr. Sosnick, watching, following him around the country to provide the first real insiders view of the glamorous world of the sports agent. After reading the book, you come to believe that it's not so glamerous after all. It looks like a lot of hard work.

Filled with insider details, this is a very interesting book.

American Original

This book is a wonderful read for any baseball fan who wants to learn of the intricacies of the business. However, it is much more than that. It is a novelistic portrait of a fascinating, Gatsby-esque character, the young baseball agent, Matt Sosnik. It describes his struggles to succeed while retaining his integrity and his basic human qualities, his capacity for honesty and true friendship in a cutthroat world. It is a wonderfully drawn portrait of the unlikely friendship between Matt, a white, Jewish, introspective entrepreneur and Dontrelle Willis, a black, gifted pitching prodigy. We come to understand the way each influences the other and along the way we get to see how frequently basic human relationships are undermined by the quest for fame and fortune. Yet in the end the Sosnik-Willis relationship seems to remain strong. The book is also novelistic in the way we see the central character, Sosnik, maturing as he struggles with his own inner demons. Crasnik has written an engrossing, often funny account of people we come to care for deeply.