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Remember Hideki’s arrival as Darvish slips away

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All of the recent brouhaha over Yu Darvish, I got to thinking about Hideki Matsui. Unlike many high-profile Japanese players who made the jump to the states, Matsui hit the Majors as an unrestricted free agent. There was no blind bidding process and subsequent negotiation. Hideki was free to pick whatever team he wanted. It almost made sense.

For Darvish, the decision to push his team to post him was a calculated risk. As ESPN.com’s Patrick Newman and Eno Sarris showed (in an Insider-only piece) on Tuesday, Darvish probably could have made more had he waited a few more years. If his deal with the Rangers ends up being at an annual level of around $12 million, there’s a good chance he would earn more in the long term by returning to Japan this year and entering the States via bidding process. Teams wouldn’t have to pony over sunk dollars on a posting fee, and Darvish would stand to make all of the money from his contract.

Yet, the allure of guaranteed dollars is a tough one to resist. It’s why pitchers are willing to sign seemingly below-market deals earlier in their careers. The threat of injury lurks, and easy access to millions is too tempting to turn down. Darvish will sign a deal that locks him up for five or six years, but if he’s as good as advertised, he’ll cash in again in his early 30s. That said, he would be wise to sign a high-dollar, low-year deal with the Rangers and hit free agency at 29. Texas, though, would rather lock him up for longer.

Anyway, I digress. The erstwhile World Series MVP was my original focus. I realized a few days ago, as the Yanks continued through a silent off-season, that I missed Matsui. Now, I don’t believe the Yanks should bring him back, but I miss his presence in left field and his bat in the lineup. Bring back the glory days of Matsui, the player who hit .292/.370/.482 on the Yanks, and I’ll be happy.

So how anyway did the Yanks land Hideki? It was the more traditional path. By the end of 2001, Matsui’s name was bandied about as a future Major Leaguer. He was the highest paid Japanese player at the time, and the next stop for him would be the States. The first time the Yanks were tied to him arrived in August of 2002 when Jack Curry reported that Jean Afterman was scouting Matsui. Over the next few months, rumors of the Yanks’ interest hit the news. Would the Bombers land both Jose Contreras and Hideki Matsui prior to 2003?

Hideki was a new — and seemingly rare — breed of Japanese players. He used a quick bat to pull the ball and was a power hitter more in the American baseball mode. As the offseason wore on, both the Yankees and the Mets emerged as potential suitors for Matsui’s services. As the Yankees tried to determine if they wanted Bartolo Colon or Roger Clemens for 2003, they stepped up their pursuit of Matsui as well, and by mid-December, they seemed poised to land him for three years and $20-21 million. It was an easy negotiation and an easy deal. Godzilla came to New York.

Since Matsui’s arrival, no Japanese player has made quite the same impact on Major League Baseball. Daisuke Matsuzaka and, to a greater extent, Kei Igawa failed to deliver as advertised, and no power hitters or All Star position players in the Ichiro or Matsui mold have arrived on U.S. soil. Now, it’s Darvish’s turn, and in Texas, where the defending AL Champs are in bad need of pitching, he’ll get a chance to star. The whole world will be watching.

Yu Can’t Always Get What Yu Want

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(Donald Miralle/Getty Images)

After months … hell, years of speculation, the Yu Darvish saga officially came to an end last night, at least as far as the Yankees as concerned. It was announced Monday night that the Texas Rangers won the negotiating rights to the Japanese right-hander with a $51.7M bid, the largest ever submitted in the relatively brief history of the posting process. The Rangers obviously decided Darvish would be a better investment than C.J. Wilson, a pretty darn good pitcher they know better than anyone. The Yankees, on the other hand, didn’t seem all that interested in getting involved in a bidding war.

Soon after the news broke, Marc Carig reported that the Yankees submitted what was essentially a safety bid. If other teams were tapped out financially this late in the offseason and Darvish fell into their laps, then great. Those were the terms under which they were willing to add the guy to their team. That obviously didn’t happen though, and it sure doesn’t seem like the Yankees will be terribly disappointed. They’ve been very passive in their pursuit of pitching this offseason, at least big name pitching like Darvish, Wilson, and Mark Buehrle. Call them cheap if you want, just don’t expect me to take you seriously if you do.

“I think like with anything else you learn over time … I think we’re more prepared today than we have been in the past,” said Brian Cashman when asked about the possibility of pursuing Darvish during his end-of-season press conference last month, obviously alluding to the Kei Igawa disaster. Cashman and then-manager Joe Torre reportedly had to ask Igawa what his best pitch was during his first season in New York, a clear sign they didn’t do their homework and based their decision to pursue the guy on emotional reaction rather than informed opinion. Emotional reactions are pretty much the worst kind of reactions, especially when it comes to making baseball decisions, but the Yankees have definitely moved away from that type of thinking in recent years. If they hadn’t, Jesus Montero would have been long gone, traded for whatever the flavor of the week was after Cliff Lee signed with the Phillies.

We know the Yankees had been scouting Darvish since at least 2008, so they certainly did their homework this time around. Special advisor and former GM Gene Michael saw him, both scouting directors Billy Eppler (pro) and Damon Oppenheimer (amateur) saw him, I’m willing to bet former Padres and current D’Backs GM Kevin Towers saw him (at least on video) when he was on the staff last year, and I’m sure a small army of scouts and other advisors saw him as well. The Yankees gathered information over a long period of time and made their decision, exactly like they should have. We might not agree with the decision to not make an aggressive play for Darvish (I don’t), but there’s nothing we can do about it.

From here, nothing changes for the Yankees. They still need pitching, still need to shore up the bench, still need to add some general depth pieces, stuff like that. Unless they decide to dance with Scott Boras about Edwin Jackson, any starting pitching solution will likely come on a short-term, relatively low-risk deal, which is definitely preferable at this point. Darvish is risky, but he’s also incredibly talented. The kind of talent you’d usually roll the dice with. There’s a chance Cashman and Yankees will end up regretting their half-hearted pursuit of the righty, but I also don’t blame them for not submitting a bid north of $50M.

Rangers win rights to Yu Darvish with $51.7M bid

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Via Jeff Passan, the Rangers have won the negotiating rights to Yu Darvish with a $51.7M bid. As expected, the bid is a new record for the posting process, topping the $51.1M the Red Sox paid to talk to Daisuke Matsuzaka five years ago. No word on what the Yankees bid, but I suspect we’ll find out soon enough.

After all the rumors of the Blue Jays being in the lead because of a monster bid, the Yankees won’t have to worry about facing Darvish six times a year every year for the next half-decade or so. The winning bid was higher than I expected, by about $10M, but what do I know? The Rangers and Darvish now have 30 days to negotiate a contract that will sure cost another $50M or so. With any luck, the rest of free agent pitching market will pick up some steam now and the Yankees can land a decent arm on a short-term deal.

Report: Yankees are “not getting” Yu Darvish

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Via Marc Carig, the Yankees are “not getting” right-hander Yu Darvish according to a person close to the situation. The team’s last second bid will not be higher than those submitted by the Rangers and Blue Jays, the presumed favorites. Backing up an earlier report, Carig’s source says the winning bid is a “ridiculous number.”

Once all this Darvish stuff becomes official on Tuesday, the Yankees will likely turn their attention to short-term fixes. Yesterday’s Mat Latos trade shows that the price for a young, high-end starter is still sky high, which makes someone like Hiroki Kuroda a much more likely target. The pitching search will almost certainly stretch out into January, just because the hot stove tends to die down around the holidays.

Report: Winning bid for Darvish is larger than Dice-K’s

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Via Franz Lids, the high bid for Yu Darvish is larger than the $51.1M the Red Sox paid for the right to negotiate with Daisuke Matsuzaka five years ago. We still don’t know who placed that bid, but late last week we heard that the Blue Jays submitted a bit worth upwards of $50M.

Instant Analysis: Holy cow, assuming this report is true. I figured Dice-K’s general mediocrity would scare teams off of a bid that large, but like we always say, it only takes one team to blow everyone out of the water. Pretty crazy. Apparently the Nippon Ham Fighters are going to take the full four business days before announcing they’ve accepted the high bid, so one way or another we’ll know who won the right to negotiate with Darvish by the end of the Tuesday.

Report: Blue Jays bid close to $50M for Darvish

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Via George King, the Blue Jays have made a bid north of $40M and closer to $50M for the negotiating rights to right-hander Yu Darvish. Orders for the monster bid apparently came from Rogers Communication, the massive communications company that owns the Jays as well as the Rogers Center. The Cubs are also believed to have made a large bid.

The Jays haven’t been confirmed as the high bidder yet, but there’s a good chance they will be if King’s report is accurate. The Yankees were said to have placed a “modest” bid, a term so vague I don’t know what to think.

Building a better posting system

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As the afternoon hours tick away in Japan, Major League Baseball and its fans are eagerly awaiting word of the Yu Darvish sweepstakes. The bidding ended at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, and we know the Yankees posted a bid. Some reports say the Yanks’ bid isn’t very substantial, and Jon Heyman called it a “modest bid.”

Right now, all we know is basically nothing. No one has yet leaked the winning figure or the winning team. We don’t know what the Yanks submitted. Maybe they went low in the hopes of preempting a skittish field. Maybe, after four years of scouting Darvish, they weren’t willing to bid high and then follow up that bid with an equally lucrative deal for an unproven commodity. Of course, the recent failures of Daisuke Matsuzaka and Kei Igawa could be fresh in their minds, but those are inexact comparisons at best.

As we wait out the results, though, I pondered the posting system earlier today. Spurred on by an article in The Times, I realized just how ludicrous a system this is. A team in Japan posts a player, and then Major League Baseball clubs submit a blind bid for the exclusive right to negotiate a deal. If the negotiations fail, that player simply returns to Japan, and the team gets its money back. There’s no incentive to give the player a fair market deal, and the team winds up spending its assets on the posting fee rather than the player.

The agents certainly don’t like the system as they suffer tremendously. “The system has already failed,” Scott Boras said to The Times, “and that type of thing is only going to increase. I lived through it with Matsuzaka. As it stands, this system doesn’t benefit anyone.”

So what might happen? In the piece, David Waldstein noted that changes may be coming to the posting system. He writes:

The posting system was introduced after the experiences of Hideo Nomo and Alfonso Soriano, who escaped their Japanese teams via loopholes. Then in 1997, the Chiba Lotte Marines, who had a working agreement with the San Diego Padres, agreed to let them sign Hideki Irabu, who refused to play for San Diego and forced a trade to the Yankees. “It wasn’t fun,” recalled Arizona Diamondbacks General Manager Kevin Towers, who was the Padres’ general manager at the time. “I think that episode annoyed a lot of people, and that’s why we have the system we have now, as flawed as it might be.”

But it might change within a couple of years. Under the new collective bargaining agreement, a committee will be established to discuss a worldwide draft, including changes to the current system along with Nippon Professional Baseball.

Boras suggested a sliding scale whereby Japanese players can negotiate with any team and their Japanese teams would receive a percentage of the contract. For instance, if a player leaves after one year, the Japanese team would get 80 percent of the contract, 50 percent after five years and 20 percent with just one year remaining before free agency. “A lot of Japanese players aren’t successful here because they aren’t comfortable in their situation,” Boras said. “If they could choose where they want to play, their success rate would definitely increase.”

Who knows if Boras, as he often does, is just selling a load of hooey. Maybe Japanese players aren’t successful because they are siphoned off to one team and have to negotiate with little leverage. Maybe they’re not successful because they just can’t beat Major League competition. Either way, the posting system is a bit of a strange beast, more akin to the amateur draft than anything else. Veteran players aren’t given the option to pick their next team. How peculiar.

For now, though, we’ll wait it out for a little while longer. At some point soon, Yu Darvish’s potential future employer will be announced. I’m not too optimistic it will be the Yankees, but as a famed broadcaster likes to say, sometimes, you just can’t predict baseball.