When you draft an agent, you are setting expectations. That sounds smaller than it is. Baseball drafts players — a bet on what someone will do before he’s done it. Documents get drafted — terms written down before anything happens. Drafting an agent is both at once: you’re choosing the player and writing the terms in the same afternoon. The choosing gets the attention. The writing down is the part that gets skipped, and it’s the part that decides whether any of this works.

The oldest contracts understood the writing down, and they were made of clay. Sumerian accountants around 8,000 BC tracked grain and livestock with small tokens; a few thousand years later they sealed the tokens inside hollow clay balls — bullae — and wrote the terms on the outside. Before any work was owed, both parties could read what was expected. After a dispute, you broke the ball open and checked the contents against the promises. Inspect before, prove after. The design predates the alphabet.

The word itself comes from the Latin contrahere, to draw together: two parties drawn around a promise. That machinery worked because the parties were people. Ea-nasir, the copper merchant of Ur around 1750 BC, is remembered through the oldest written customer complaint precisely because a promise that doesn’t match the delivery leaves a mark on a man who has to keep doing business in town. Reputation was the enforcement.

An agent is not a man in town. It has no reputation to protect, no shame to feel, no court to fear. That changes what the written terms are for. With people, a contract rides alongside the relationship — a record of a deal both sides already want to keep. With an agent, the written expectations are the whole relationship. What success looks like, in one sentence. What’s out of bounds. What it may touch, what it may spend, what evidence it leaves behind. If you didn’t write it down, the agent doesn’t know it, and nobody reviewing the work can know it either. The document isn’t protection from the agent. It’s the agent’s understanding of the job.

Moneyball makes the point from the other direction. Peter Brand tells Billy Beane: “Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins.” Contracts were how the league talked about its business, but the paper was never the goal — the performance was. When Beane signs Scott Hatteberg, the expectation is blunt: get on base. One expectation, visible to everyone, checked in every at-bat.

That’s the standard for drafting an agent, and it’s how you build the right team — not by collecting them, but by writing down what you expect from each one. Not a legal artifact, not a stack of terms that impresses a review committee. A short, visible, checkable set of expectations — sealed before the work starts, kept as evidence after. The Sumerians had the whole idea four thousand years before the first agent. They just wrote it down on the outside of the ball.