ESPN.com, showcasing the cover story from The Magazine, has an interesting though somewhat herky-jerky story about Yu Darvish, the new Japanese phenom pitcher who could eventually e better — and richer — than Dice-K if he heads to the Major Leagues at some point. It takes quite a while to get to the interesting part — will he ever come here, and how much will it cost — though in Jim Caple’s defense the interview with Yu was granted on the condition that he would not be asked about coming to America. But the money paragraph, which comes long after a traipse around the Nippon Ham Fighters name and Yu’s nude picture in a Japanese magazine, is this:

Most everyone says if Darvish is posted, the bidding will easily top the $50 million the Seibu Lions received in exchange for the rights to Dice-K. After that, Johnson says, “The sky is the limit as to where the big-money teams would go.” Given the usual escalation in baseball contracts, it isn’t crazy to think the negotiating fee could go to $75 million.

Sorry, but this has to stop. $75 million just to negotiate is something only a handful of teams (or maybe just two teams) can afford. If he’s as good as advertised, he could get 5 years for $100 million on top of that fee. We’re not sure what a better system for bringing in Japanese and other foreign players would be, but this is not the solution.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.