Steve Baker shares his greatest sports memories with Ultimate Sports Guide
Greatest memories:
a drive, a ball and a bonus
— Steve Baker
My greatest memories as a sports fan and agent were the creation of an exception to the NFL salary cap, missing out on the possibility of catching a historic baseball, and watching a client achieve a $10 million bonus I had negotiated with the legendary Bill Walsh.
No. 1: I was driving through the San Francisco Presidio one day in early 1999, on the way to the birth of my twins at California Pacific Medical Center, and the Oakland Raiders called offering a $500,000 one-year deal to a linebacker client of my mine.
I asked if they’d agree that he’d be worth $1 million if he were the starter and if they’d agree that 51 percent playing time would qualify him as a starter.
They said they would pay $1 million if he were the starter but couldn’t negotiate an incentive to get to $1 million at 51 percent playing time since my client had seen action in over 80 percent of the plays the previous year and any incentive below that amount would count against the salary cap.
I thought there was a good chance my client would be in on over 50 percent of the plays that year but 80 percent was very unlikely. I asked the team to consider if I could come up with a salary cap-friendly way to close the deal.
They agreed to my proposal of a five-year deal (where the final four years could disappear after the first year), with a $500,000 signing bonus that was deferred to the end of the year and forfeited if my client failed to play 51 percent of the plays. It was an end run around the salary cap because of the potential $1 million payout on a deal whose salary cap number was only $600,000. And it was unique — such a deal had never before been negotiated in the NFL.
One of my passions in the sports business is to find unique ways to structure a deal. As it turned out, my client played over 51 percent of the plays (but saw far less action than the year before) and made his $1 million. The team got a starter at a fair contract. And last but hardly least, my wife gave birth to twins that day, a boy and girl (Ben and Sabrina). Feb. 9, 1999, one of the best days of my life.
Sabrina and Ben Baker
No. 2: During Game 1 of the Dodgers vs. A’s 1988 World Series, my future wife and I had to leave our right-field seats in the seventh inning to go see my future mother-in-law in the premiere of the play “Steel Magnolias” at the Pasadena Playhouse.
We watched the ninth inning on my little Sony Watchman in the playhouse parking lot. That’s where we saw injured Dodger Kirk Gibson hit perhaps the most famous game-winning home run in baseball history right into the area where we had been sitting in right field.
My mother-in-law got a standing ovation, and the Dodgers went on to pull off one of the great World Series upsets. I suspect that ball is now pretty valuable.
No. 3: It was the final game of the San Francisco 49ers 2001 season.
I had negotiated a $10 million escalation clause into Jeff Garcia’s contract, which would be earned if he finished the season as the NFL’s third-rated quarterback.
Going into the game he was ranked fourth. But then he threw four touchdown passes and passed Brett Favre to finish as the third-ranked quarterback in the NFL by less than a percentage point. I’ll never forget Jeff’s face the following day when in my office I told him he had just made another $10 million.
But more important, and better than any of these, was my son’s first goal in water polo last year.
Steve Baker is a prominent San Francisco-based sports attorney and law professor who has negotiated millions of dollars in creative sports and marketing contracts for professional athletes, broadcasters and Olympic athletes.
Steve negotiated what were at the time the largest quarterback, outside linebacker and special teams player contracts in NFL history. Local San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders clients include: Jeff Garcia, Ray Brown, Shayne Skov, Jon Ritchie, Matt Giordano and Courtney Anderson. He is a graduate of Tufts University and Cornell Law School.