Best Seat in the House: Darek Braunecker's Dealing Lands Lee, Burnett in Playoffs

Darek Braunecker has been living a sports agent’s charmed life lately representing two of major league baseball’s best starting pitchers, who both happen to be Arkansans. The Little Rock-based agent worked some off-season magic to land North Little Rock native A.J. Burnett a spot with the New York Yankees, not to mention a five-year, $82.5 million contract. Before the summer trade deadline, Braunecker was in the middle of a huge deal between the defending world champion Philadelphia Phillies and Cleveland Indians that brought the 2008 American League Cy Young Award-winner, Benton’s Cliff Lee, to the City of Brotherly Love, where he started putting up Cy Young Award-type numbers again in August.

Needless to say, Braunecker’s busy travel schedule, where he follows his clients in the major and minor leagues and puts himself in front of potential new clients, will continue through October as he follows Braunecker Sports Counseling’s top two clients. In fact, the Yankees and Phillies could be on a collision course to meet in the World Series later this month. Had pitcher Dustin Mosley, another client, not been sidelined by injury with the Los Angeles Angels, Braunecker would have had three teams to follow this month.

Braunecker, a former minor league player before going to work as an agent, and his wife, Shelley, have two young children, Ellie and Rhett.

He visited with ArkansasSports360.com last week as the pennant races wound down and teams starting prepping for the playoffs beginning this week.

ArkansasSports360: The way your year, and your clients’ year, has gone, the ideal scenario might be World Series Game 7, in New York, Nov. 3, Cliff Lee vs. A.J. Burnett. That might be tough on you, huh?

Braunecker: Let’s put it this way, I’ll be sitting on my hands that day. There won’t be a lot of cheering either going into the night.

AS360.com: In less than a year, you were part of two blockbuster deals with your clients, getting them on two contenders, A.J. signing with the Yankees as a free agent and Cliff getting to the Phillies in a trade. How did those deals evolve?

DB: Obviously with what happened with A.J. in the off-season, he made it real clear to me that if he was going to leave Toronto — he had the out in his contract and we exercised it — his desire was to pitch in New York if all things were relatively equal. And so we were fortunate you had a franchise, a club like that with a high degree of interest and allowed us to get a deal done with a club my client wanted to play for the most. We were able to maximize the dollars and get him in a place he wanted to play.

With Cliff, it became apparent at the end of spring training that he wasn’t going to remain in Cleveland beyond his current contract, and we made it real clear to the club that we had no interest in discussing anything pertaining to an extension going forward, we were kind of closing the window there with Cleveland. I went back and revisited the situation with them during the All-Star break and reiterated his desire to play out the contract and enter the free-agent market after the option year. He wanted to pitch in meaningful games in September and have a chance at the post-season. I encouraged the Indians to look at trade possibilities because I felt like it was an opportunity for the club to maximize the return value more so than waiting until the off-season.