Balance on Both Sides

from the New Yorker profile of baseball's Scott Boras

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.

Superagent Boras addresses a congregation of his enemies: Major League Baseball's management and owners. Boras is widely known for helping to inflate players' salaries to astronomical sums.

But here he doesn't gloat, or even acknowledge any discrepancy between his players' interests and the owners'. Amiably, Boras claims that both parties individually "provide balance."

This bit of slick rhetoric obscures the countervailing forces at work. Who needs give and take when you've got two balances joining to form one supreme harmonious balance? In truth Boras provides a demand, then subtly suggests that he's getting a better offer from another team, at which point the owners shell out millions.