UPDATE (8:00) Piling on a bit here, but Heyman also says that the Yankee bid is nothing special and that the winning bid is expected to be sky high.
UPDATE (7:47) Apparently the bid was not huge and probably not enough to win.
UPDATE (7:42) Jack Curry confirmed the Yankees’ bid:
During meetings today, Yankees discussed Darvish. Eventually, they elected to make a bid on the pitcher.
UPDATE (7:27) Brian Cashman, being very cryptic, wouldn’t confirm the Yankees’ submission:
Cashman, via text, on if he offered a bid for Yu Darvish: “Wouldn’t say.” So… there’s that
So the postings for Yu Darvish are complete. From Buster Olney, we learned that the Yankees did, in fact, submit a bid. Let’s hope it was enough to win. Any updates will be posted here.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
10 Responses to Darvish Postings Finished
Leave a Reply
TIQ IQ
Until the real bids are confirmed I won’t hold these tweets as gospel, but it doesn’t surprise me at all if our is in fact modest. I said all along that I believed the Yankees had only passing interest in Darvish wouldn’t be going over 35-40 million.
I for one am happy with these initial reports. A “sky high” bid and then a 70+ million dollar contract is not something I want the Yankees to enter into, for what is basically an unproven rookie. I’m still hoping Cashman’s number 1 target is Gio.
I kind of hope the Jays don’t win, but really I don’t care where he goes. I will be tuning in to see him pitch from time to time though.
This may be a stupid question, but why would you even bother submitting a bid if you’re going to submit a sure loser?
Well since you don’t know what other teams bids are until after the winner is announced you don’t know what will and won’t win. For instance no one expected the winning bid for Nakajima to be 2 million, least of all the Yankees. But because the rest of the bids were low enough, the Yankees low bid won the rights to negotiate with the SS. Now they have a chance to sign Hiroyuki to be a utility guy, which could make Nunez expendable via trade, to be a second utility guy off the bench with Nunez, or trade Nakajima in a package.
If the market had been low on Darvish, say if all the other teams had serious doubts about Japanese cross-overs, you could end up getting Darvish with a low posting fee in a range you are comfortable with. If not and teams go crazy high with the bidding, it doesn’t hurt you to at least throw the bid out there. It’s a smart move because it doesn’t cost you anything if you lose.
I doubt the bid is something ridiculously low like 10-20 million, it’s probably something closer to the 33-35 million the Yanks bid on Daisuke. But it seems as if the winning bid may even top Matsuzaka’s winning bid of 51 million, maybe even by quite a bit.
To jack up the bids of competitors; plus, there is the outside chance nobody else would make a credible bid. It’s a low-risk high-reward play that costs nothing if it doesn’t pan out.
LOL…I see Chris just beat me to this reply. Same thoughts, nice detail man.
I don’t see how you can “jack up the bids on the competitors”. No one even knew the Yankees placed a bid until after the bidding was closed today, plus the Yankees have been making it seem like they had very little interest in the media. If you wanted to “jack up” bidding you would be making a big fuss through “anonymous sources” in the 4 days since he was posted.
Plus from Jack Curry’s reporting it sounds like the Yankees didn’t even place a bid until today. I’m sure plenty of bids were place in the last couple of days, not every team would’ve waited until the last minute.
Your second point is the one that makes the most sense. It’s a “just in case bid”. If you’re only comfortable paying 30-35 million on the posting fee you make that bid just in case that’s all it takes.
EDIT: I guess great minds think alike nyyankeefanforever!
They said all along they were going to be “in on Darvish” Chris — exactly what the Yankees would want out there as everybody knows Brian always tries to tamp down expectations. Only a twit GM would “make a fuss” no matter what their strategy. But, as you said earlier, nobody knows squat for sure. In any event, the real story will become clear before very long and then we’ll both know what the strategy was and if it actually worked.
You’re missing my point.
If you wanted to “jack up the price” for the competitors (like the Jays and Rangers), yet you had no real interest in going high on the bidding yourself you would make it seem like you had interest through “anonymous sources”. Of course Cashman would never come out himself and make a fuss, he would simply have someone plant information that the Yankees were serious bidders in this thing. That would cause other GMs to be afraid of a monster bid from the big bad Yankees, like the Red Sox when they over bid the Yankees by almost 20 million on Dice-K.
When guys like Heyman, Buster Olney, Verducci, Rosenthal, etc… mention a “source” it’s usually someone from inside the club planting information. Levine and Cashman do this all the time, in fact most of the time you hear about a “Yankee source” it’s one of those two.
My point is they maintained a very lukewarm level of interest the entire time, so much so no one really expected the Yankees to be serious bidders in this process from the get go (outside of Yankee bloggers and fans who wanted them to be). I don’t believe there was any attempt at all to “jack up the bid”. If anything they wanted it as low as possible, with the intention of only being able to get Darvish if the rest of the field bid down to what they were comfortable with. Like I said above I think that number is somewhere between 33-35 million.
Look I get your point Chris and it’s well-taken. I just respectfully disagree. Brian’s credibility with the media is super high almost to a fault. When he wants the word out that he’s after something — like Lee, for instance — he lets the world know loud and clear and makes no bones about it. He’s often said the hardest part of being the Yankees GM is also the easiest insofar as he doesn’t have to worry about feeding the media beast because they assume the Yankees are in on everybody, yet that same hyped interest level causes agents and GMs to think he’s always willing and able to pay more than he is — and lukewarm is Brian’s default temperature most of the time. Most writers say he’s a clam publicly, and I seldom see any of them say he’s a source either before or after a story, which is rare in that business where writers can’t help bragging about their contacts. We’ll see.
I’m just making it clear that it wouldn’t be a “twit GM” who would plant information via sources behind the scenes. It happens everyday, by all teams, and Cashman does it on a pretty regular basis.
If you think Cashman doesn’t use the media then I believe you are underestimating him big time. The media can’t run their mouths about the name of every source, otherwise they wouldn’t be trusted by said source in the future. Just like Ken Rosenthal hasn’t revealed who let him in on the Pujols to the Angels tip, even though he said it was “a very interesting story”. He said that one won’t come out for many years. It just makes no sense to betray that source now.
The guys Cashman goes to, and levine for that matter, are guys they trust to get the information out in the manner they want it.
It’s easy to tell when Cashman is the source. When the story credits a “team source” it’s directly from him or approved by him. When it’s “a source close to the team” it’s the sportswriter floating either one of his own conjured thoughts or that of one of his fellow beat writers — and you see dang few of the former and a whole ton of the latter. Not to bang a drum too hard, but I was involved in the NY news media for quite some time and knew many of the sportswriters covering the team today, and that little lesson in sourcing came straight from them. And I do not in any way underestimate Brian, nor do I think it denigrates him to say not only does he not rely much on the media to do his job but also that holds the beat writers about one foot higher in his estimation than dog pooh. Just count all the “non-news” stories by exasperated writers in a month that trash him for never returning calls or leaving them with only perfunctory, non-responsive responses when he does. To my mind, that elevates his esteem, it doesn’t lower it.