I Don’t Know (Third Base)
There’s a quick prologue to this story: Last week, the University of Miami signed Duke’s former quarterback off the transfer portal for a reported cool $10 million per year. Put in perspective: that’s roughly $900,000 more than Drake Maye, the NFL’s 2025 MVP runner-up, will make in 2026.
That’s our way of saying that we’re going to be seeing the following issue a lot more over the next few years:
Alec Bohm is the usually reliable, solid hitting third baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, though until recently he’s been mired in the worst slump of his career. He was the Phillies’ top draft pick, number 3 overall, out of Wichita State in 2018. He received a signing bonus of $5.85 million. He joined the major league club in 2020, finished second in Rookie of the Year voting and has been a mainstay at third ever since. He’s making $10.2 million this season as he heads to free agency.
About his slow start, this may have something to do with it: in March, Bohm sued his parents.
The claim: $3 million with the allegation that Daniel and Lisa Bohm mismanaged their son’s finances from the moment he turned professional. Per the suit, his parents built a tangle of limited liability companies to run his affairs, paid some of his bills out of them — and helped themselves to “sizeable amounts” for personal use while telling him next to nothing about where the money was going. They also, the filing says, misrepresented their own ownership stakes in the companies. At some point, it is also alleged, he was told he was legally barred from being a member of any of those LLCs.
A hearing late last week bogged down in whether the LLCs were the product of “fraud in the inducement” or “fraud in the execution.” If that confuses you, you’ll feel better knowing that it also confused the judge, who called the distinction “vexing even for people who went to law school and even people sitting up here.”
Note that Bohm is, in a sense, the old model. He put in three years at Wichita State, got drafted at 21, and only then collected his $5.85 million bonus. The new model hands eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds eight-figure paydays before they’ve declared a major.
Now, the money arrives, and somebody in the family knows a guy. Or is the guy. You know, the Uncle Bobs of the world who once almost had a walk-on tryout with Bear Bryant and ‘knows how it works.’ What could go wrong? Alec Bohm knows.
So does Padres’ superstar, Fernando Tatis Jr. He signed a deal at 18, as he started in the minor leagues, with a company called Big League Advance. The pitch was simple: $2 million up front in exchange for 10% of everything he’d ever earn in the majors. If he didn’t make it, he’d owe nothing. He made it. By the time he signed a 14-year, $340 million contract in 2022, he had already paid BLA $1,569,785. BLA’s ten percent on the new contract works out to roughly $34 million, so by the time Tatis hits free agency again at age 36 he will have paid $35,569,785 on that $2 million ‘advance.’
Tatis sued to tear the deal up, calling it a predatory loan dressed as an investment. Last week, a San Diego court disagreed, upheld the contract, and ordered him to pay up—including attorney’s fees. The grown-up helping an underage Tatis sign away a tenth of his career was his father, Fernando Sr., himself a former big leaguer. Knowing your way around a batter’s box, it turns out, is not the same as knowing your way around a term sheet.
A quick side note on just how upside-down this is and is going to be. Youth sports are now a roughly $40 billion business, and private equity has swooped in. KKR bought the cheerleading giant Varsity Brands for $4.75 billion. A firm backed by Apollo’s Josh Harris and Blackstone’s David Blitzer scooped up the youth-baseball tournament complex at Cooperstown along with a pile of travel-ball and showcase operators. IMG Academy went for $1.25 billion. There are Wall Street analysts who can quote you the EBITDA of your nine-year-old’s flag-football league.
The little Stevies of the world—the Little Leaguers already throwing 80-mph—are being scouted, ranked, monetized, and consolidated by professionals at every level except the one that’s going to matter most when the checks start clearing. Stevie’s going to need a lawyer.
Margo’s Got David E. Kelley Problems
David E. Kelley went to law school (Boston University). He passed the bar, practiced briefly in Boston, and then famously decided it was a lot more fun (and profitable) to write about lawyers rather than be one.
What followed was (is) one of the more remarkable runs in television history: L.A. Law, The Practice, Ally McBeal, Boston Legal, Boston Public, Big Little Lies, The Lincoln Lawyer, Presumed Innocent. Decades of prestige television, most of it touching, in one way or another, on the law.
You’d expect, then, at least a solid framework of authenticity in his shows. Sometimes you get it. Mostly you don’t, something Kelley seems somewhat aware of – he admitted that he built The Practice as a rebuttal to L.A. Law because he thought it had “buffed the whole profession into something glossy and false.” Then he turned around and gave Ally McBeal dancing-baby hallucinations, and trials run like improv night by way of 1970s SCTV. Boston Legal’s closing arguments were really stump speeches no judge would sit still for. Apple TV’s Presumed Innocent was… well… that is to say… simply got just about everything wrong about criminal law possible.
His latest show and huge hit, Margo’s Got Money Troubles (Apple TV), is a lot more Presumed Innocent than The Practice.
If you haven’t seen it (mild spoiler alert ahead): Margo is a freshman at Cal State Fullerton who has an affair with her writing professor—a man who is married, employed in a position of authority over her, and apparently unbothered by any of that—gets pregnant, then decides to keep the baby. Fired from her job, she pays for diapers, food, rent, and onesies by becoming a very imaginative, moderately successful OnlyFans creator. When her hidden OnlyFans identity is outed and goes viral, the professor suddenly decides he should have sole custody of the son he’s never met.
The show is funny. Margo is dynamic and sympathetic. The writing is sharp, the acting outstanding. The problem is the custody hearing(s).
But first, a free legal lesson from an earlier scene: Shortly after giving birth, a sleep-deprived Margo is summoned to a posh lawyer’s office. The professor’s mother has arranged it. Margo is accused of attempted extortion for having the temerity to ask the professor for money. She is threatened then smooth-talked by an “I like to solve problems nicely” older lawyer in a $2,500 suit. There’s an agreement on the table: fifty thousand dollars into a trust for the baby, untouchable until the child turns eighteen . . . oh, and Margo withdraws from school so the professor won’t be tormented by her presence.
Pro Tip: if you find yourself alone in a lawyer’s office, accused of something you’re pretty damn sure you didn’t do, handed an already-drafted agreement, and told to sign—leave. Get a lawyer. Period. The lawyer across the table is very good at his job. His job is not you.
Anyway, the custody dispute goes to mediation, where we get to watch as both parties—with no prior discussions—go into a room, are seated across from each other, lawyers at their sides, mediator at the head of the table, and just start. Talking. Unabated. Professor begins by ripping Margo’s choices, her career, her fitness as a mother. The mediator does and says nothing. Margo’s attorney objects only when a screenshot of Margo’s OnlyFans page is thrown on the table.
If you’ve ever even walked by a mediation room you already know this is all wrong. The idea that a trained mediator would sit in silence while one party systematically attempts to dismantle the other without evidence of any kind is ridiculous. As is the idea that the verbally abused party’s attorney would sit without a word except to object to the screenshot. Mediation ends abruptly when Margo launches across the table at Professor.
Not how mediation works. Kelley set the template for family-law mediation in L.A. Law through the dapper, vicious Arnie Becker and in forty years never got the memo that it’s wrong.
It gets worse when they go to court. In a word: unreal. No, really. Unreal. From the judge firing into the courtroom like Margo’s dad, Jinx, used to fire into a wrestling ring, to that judge’s unending motion as he questions everybody while standing on top of them.
Worse, he then does the equivalent of letting the dog pick out who it likes best by having each family member on both sides hold the baby while he stares and gauges—something. Then he awards custody to Margo, the professor getting visitation every other weekend. That order is shouted as the judge sprints out of the courtroom on the way to his next bout.
Great. Also, wow.
Through all the drama and some great throwaway, funny lines, there is one thing missing: child support. The professor has never paid a dime in child support. It is simply not discussed. By anyone. Ever. Again. Wow.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles was Certified Fresh and renewed for a second season within weeks of its premiere. The show is fun, it has nothing to do with the real world of family law . . . or any kind of law. Please don’t think it does.
Don’t Miss an Issue
Haven’t subscribed yet? Agree with Homer? Then don’t miss another issue, subscribe now. And . . . if you know someone who may enjoy this, please feel free to forward this issue to them.
