Boras blows hot air during endless ‘treatises’

Scott Boras is a lot easier to take if you understand that the guys across the table from him are just as full of it as he is.

They just aren’t as full of themselves. But then, who could be?

For instance, as we were about to sign off at the end of a lengthy phone conversation Tuesday afternoon, Boras said the following words to me: “As I enter into the theater of this negotiation … “

The rest of what he said is obscured on my tape recorder by the sound of guffaws. Mine.

Nobody could be this pretentious, this self-important, this precious all the time.

But wait, it gets better. A little later on, when the conversation turned to Sunday night, and the hysterical outcry over the “announcement” that Alex Rodriguez had opted out of the remainder of his New York Yankees contract, Boras said this: “Major League Baseball obviously wants to shove a petard into my soul.”

Obviously. That, of course, sounds like a nice way of saying something that can’t be printed in a family newspaper. And you think Rodriguez is rehearsed?

Rodriguez only dabbles in the things that Boras traffics in: drama and pretension and verbal contortions designed to befuddle as much as impress. His negotiations take place in “war rooms.” He details the value of his clients in lengthy, carefully worded and meticulously researched “treatises.” He often uses words of his own invention, such as “assurety” and “malperformance.”

I am now of the assurety that he extracts the kinds of deals that he does because the owners have no idea what the hell he is talking about.

By the time they figure it out, it is too late. He and Rodriguez – or Carlos Beltran or J.D. Drew or whomever he is treatising at the moment – are off to the bank.

And so it will be with the next sucker, er, owner, who regards the latest treatise on Rodriguez as if it were one of those glossy sales brochures for a luxury car. By the time you get to the end, you have to have it, and to hell with the sticker price.

It worked with the New York Mets and Steve Phillips in 2000 before Fred Wilpon got a look at the numbers, and it worked with Tom Hicks and it will work either in L.A. or Chicago or yes, Flushing, now that Wilpon has all that extra cash burning a hole in his pocket.

Boras is a lot of things, but dope isn’t one of them. If he is willing to alienate the two bidders you would think he needs – the Yankees and Boston Red Sox – to make the latest Rodriguez auction a success, he must either already have his deal in hand or know where it is coming from.

It could be the Mets, of whom Boras provided a glowing assessment of everyone involved from Omar Minaya to both Wilpons to the hot dog vendors at Shea. He said the Mets were one player shy of “a juggernaut,” the type of team that could appear in “six or seven of the next 10 World Series.”

That player, of course, would be Rodriguez – and a pitcher or two, if there’s any money left over.