The solution to all Frank Thomas' problems is right in front of him.

Mark McGwire.

	Match made in heaven: McGwire the agent and McGwire the first baseman.

Or more specifically, Mark McGwire as his agent.

While Thomas has tried desperately to distance himself from the mustard gas cloud he released over himself last week, McGwire has become a borderline suck-up for baseball management by becoming his own representative and doing a below-market deal on his own behalf.

Okay, that's putting it in excessive terms. For one, McGwire is entitled to do his own deal, and is equally entitled to be satisfied by whatever dollar figure he wants. And to call him a management suck-up is the kind of cheap literary device most people abandon in seventh grade. He just wants to be above, or at least to the side of, the onrushing fray, and that, too, is protected by the Constitution under the "Leave me the hell out of this" clause.

But back to Thomas, the refrigerator-sized designated hitter who found his present contract to be patently unfair to, well, Frank Thomas.

It seems Thomas' agents have decided to fire him as a client, using the public relations firestorm as cover for whatever the real reason might be.

Which means, and I think you can follow us here, that Frank needs an agent.

And now that Mark has finished with his own client in record time . . . well, you can see the obvious serendipity here.

For one, St. Louis isn't that far from Chicago, so McGwire can always pop up the road for negotiations. Plus, the Cardinals make three trips to Chicago anyway to beat the Cubs into bloody stumps, so he and Jerry Reinsdorf are always just a spin of the Day Runner away.

For two, Thomas seems in a fairly amenable mood about his deal, having been slapped across the chops with a bag of auto parts for wanting his deal reconfigured. He isn't as likely to walk into Reinsdorf's office with Scott Boras as he once might have been.

And for three, if Thomas is right, we're really only talking about a couple of clauses, so McGwire's lack of legal experience and total absence of an office staff should be no impediment to making a deal that everyone can live with happily.

God, it's so simple, it can't possibly work.

For one, McGwire is probably a bad choice because Reinsdorf could claim that Thomas isn't as good a player as his own agent, an argument McGwire would have a difficult time refuting.

For two, McGwire could conceivably end up playing in the World Series against his own client, which could lead to the temptation of telling Thomas his contract still stinks on ice and urging him to sit out the last week of October to teach those ungrateful hyenas in the White Sox front office a painful but valuable lesson.

And for three, having them on the same side of Reinsdorf's office would in and of itself cause the room to tilt.

The problem here is that Thomas chose a bad time to lose his agent, and McGwire chose an equally difficult moment to become one. Now, with the entire agent world about to explode from the amalgamation of new and spectacularly untenable agency alliances, a lone wolf like McGwire will have a hard time collecting clients outside his own clubhouse.

As any agent will tell you, it's not a good idea to concentrate on one clubhouse. Diversification is the key to optimal accumulation, and diversification requires lots of hours working the lobby . . . any lobby.

McGwire, though, is prone to bouts of concentration on his summer job. He tends to leave other details hanging, and you know how the modern athlete needs constant schmoozing.

Especially Thomas, who has just learned with his full face how cruel the outside world can be. He could use a little cover right now, having sprinted past Gary Sheffield and even Alex Rodriguez to the front of the ""selfish athlete" market.

Too bad, too. McGwire and Thomas could have made a fine team, able to intimidate even the wealthiest suit simply by rolling up their sleeves.

Thomas could use McGwire's good will, McGwire could expand his client base, and Reinsdorf could even try to cuddle up to McGwire as a successor in case the Thomas negotiations blow up.

Well, we can dream, anyway ... at least as long as the Rumpelminze holds out.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a frequent contributor to ESPN.com.