Fletcher brings mother's touch to stable of clients

	John Smoltz is just one of Molly Fletcher's impressive stable of clients. Courtesy of Career Sports Entertainment
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The diaper was a little bit smelly and a whole lot wet.

Molly Fletcher looked across the hospital room and said to Michael Barrett, "We need to change that."

Barrett, then the Cubs catcher and a dad for all of an hour, looked back at Fletcher, stammered, and said, "Well, you need to do it."

Now try picturing Scott Boras changing a poopie diaper.

Fletcher, like Boras, is a super sports agent. Unlike Boras, she's not telling Bud Selig the World Series needs more games and she's not telling reporters her pitcher needs a new pitch count. But she is the future of sports agents. And that's in no small part, because she's a mother.

"That's the misconception of this business, that you have to be a barracuda," Fletcher said. The 35-year-old blonde with three girls under five and 200 clients under seven-figure contracts giggled and went on, "Sometimes if people like you, they want to help you."

It was 13 years ago as a fresh-faced Michigan State grad that the then-Molly West loaded up her car, waved bye to the parents who thought she was nuts, and drove to Atlanta. She'd played tennis and majored in communications and had no idea how she'd pull a paycheck other than "sports might be a nice lane to go down."

She swapped tennis lessons for rent, found a gig as a gofer at the 1995 Super Bowl, another at the 1996 Olympics, and then got herself 15 minutes with Lonnie Cooper, who 10 years before had lamded Spud Webb and Mike Fratello as clients and launched Career Sports and Entertainment.

Women weren't agents. Cooper only had one other employee. He hired Fletcher anyway. Today, CS&E has hundreds of clients 80 employees. There's Billy Donovan and Tom Izzo, and John Smoltz and Bobby Cox, and Fletcher, who's one of only five women in the MLB Players Association's roster of 400 registered agents -- and is now President at the agency.

"I think being a woman in this business is an advantage," she said. "Being inherently nurturing and loving is part of being a woman and that helps us do what we do better."

Fletcher started out cutting endorsement deals, and she quietly watched as Cooper's clients soared and got traded. She wondered about the players who had three hours to catch a flight, and the wife who had a house to sell and the kids who had to say goodbye to their friends.

"Are they taking that to the plate with them? Are they taking that to the mound with them?" she thought. She convinced Cooper he needed a TLC division and that's the group Mike Maroth called last month. Detroit was in Atlanta and so was his family, except the Tigers had traded him, and he had to get to St. Louis. Fletcher put Maroth's wife, Brooke, their two kids and Brooke's parents onto a private plane, got them out to St. Louis and in the pitcher's first outing against the Mets, Maroth threw 7 1/3 innings of one-run ball.

"We definitely took a few things off his plate," Fletcher said. She can line up sponsors and talk patience at the plate with the best of them, but it's the pride in her voice right there that separates Fletcher.