Tag Archives: Yu Darvish

Darvish completes deal with Texas

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Major League Baseball will welcome a new international talent to its roster this season after Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish signed a six-year contract with the Texas Rangers.

Much as foreign players joining the Premiership can take some time to get used to playing in England, so Darvish will go through a period of transition as he gets used to his new surroundings. 

Daisuke Matsuzaka faced a similar period of transition and never reached the heights that were expected of him. However, all of the reports suggest that Darvish has the talent and character to succeed Stateside.

He might be a star pitcher coming over from Japan, but that’s really where the similarities with Matsuzaka end. Darvish should be considered as a talent in his own right and when you look at him that way, it’s not difficult to see why the Rangers have acquired him.

Darvish has been linked with a move to MLB for several years due to his utter dominance on the mound in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball League. A recent feature on the MLB Network examined his pitching statistics and compared him favourably with Stephen Strasburg and the Rays’ Matt Moore.  Continue reading →

Rangers raise the stakes again with $51.7m bid for Darvish

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After all the rumours, it was Texas, rather than Toronto, who were the highest bidder for Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish.

Toronto can turn their attention to other targets, possibly swinging a trade for a pitcher like Gio Gonzalez, or maybe even setting up a Jose Bautista-Prince Fielder double act in their batting lineup.

As for Texas, the fun has only just begun.  Now it’s on to the tricky process of negotiating a contract.

The spectre of Daisuke Matsuzaka has never been far away in the Darvish story.  Matsuzaka’s decidedly mixed transition to North America has made some question whether Darvish’s star will shine so brightly in MLB as it has in Japan.  The Boston Red Sox’s $51,111,111 bid doesn’t look like money well spent in retrospect, to say the very least.

When it came to posting a bid for Darvish, there were several different approaches that a team could take. They could have shied away from such a vast sum as a risky investment, they could have believed that he is a superior talent to Matsuzaka and therefore potentially worth a similar amount, or believed that he is a superior talent but that $51.1m was paying well over the odds and therefore settled on a significant but lesser figure.

The Rangers went for the middle position of those three, bidding $51.7m.  The current conversion rate has that at approximately £33.1m, intriguingly close to the £35m that Liverpool speculated on the similarly risky (in different ways) Andy Carroll.  Put that down as reason number two why the Red Sox’s owners – also Liverpool’s owners, of course – steered clear of dishing out a similar sum this time around.  Continue reading →