Bad Bunny’s agency offered $200,000 loan, concert tickets to players: MLBPA

The Major League Baseball Players Association told a judge this week that Bad Bunny’s sports agency committed “a series of grave violations,” including offers of concert and NBA tickets as gifts to players they did not represent.

In federal court in Puerto Rico, the union accused the agency, Rimas Sports, of improperly offering a $200,000 interest-free loan to an unspecified player it was trying to lure, and of making a gift of $19,500 to a different player who signed with Rimas. The allegations were included in a memo filed by the MLBPA Wednesday, and offered the most public detail yet of the fight between the union and the agency.

On April 10, the union decertified one of the agents at Rimas Sports, William Arroyo, and barred two of the company’s founders, Noah Assad and Jonathan Miranda, from formally becoming agents — a process that the union controls. Rimas has called the punishments an improper “death penalty.”

The MLBPA found that the agency had promised “improper inducements to dozens of players, providing and promising loans to players not represented by Rimas,” and that the agency had asked people who were not certified agents to do agenting work.

The union said that agents at Rimas offered and provided VIP tickets to Bad Bunny shows, and suite access at a Phoenix Suns game. Benito Martinez, better known as Bad Bunny, is a “semi-passive investor” in the agency, as the MLBPA put it. He co-founded the agency alongside Assad and Miranda in 2021.

After an arbitrator, Michael Gottesman, backed the union in denying Rimas’ appeal nine days later, Rimas turned to federal court in mid-May, arguing the union “scrutinized the agency in a discriminatory, biased, and pre-determined investigation, all designed to put Rimas Sports permanently out of business.”

Arbitrator decisions in agent matters are typically not revealed publicly, but the MLBPA noted that Gottesman wrote that the “apparent raison-d-etre [sic] of Rimas appears to be building a baseball agency by luring players with forbidden gifts.”

Rimas Sports is seeking an injunction, while the union is arguing the case does not belong in court and that an injunction would be an “extraordinary remedy” based on “unclean hands” and “threadbare evidence.” Rimas accused the MLBPA of first starting to target the agency in April 2022.

After Arroyo, Assad, and Miranda had been notified they were under investigation, Rimas was “so dismissive of their obligations,” the union alleged, “that they employed their resources and uncertified staff to continue violating” the MLBPA agent regulations.

Among the players Rimas has represented are the New York Mets’ Francisco Alvarez and Ronny Mauricio, the Cincinnati Reds’ Santiago Espinal, the Colorado Rockies’ Yonathan Daza, the San Francisco Giants’ Wilmer Flores, the Oakland Athletics’ Jordan Diaz and the Baltimore Orioles’ Livan Soto. The agency also represents Diego Cartaya, a Los Angeles Dodgers top prospect.

Ronald Acuña Jr. of the Atlanta Braves was expected to sign with the agency in April.

(Photo: Daniel Shirey / MLB Photos via Getty Images)