"The $100,000,000.00 Man?"
The Boston Red Sox clearly weren’t kidding around when they said that they would work extremely hard this off-season in trying to wash away the bitter taste of the failed 2006 campaign. At first, with miniscule signings and deals featuring familiar names like Wakefield, Timlin and Cora, it looked like business as usual in the Fenway offices, but who could foresee this? Not only did the Sox make a highly competitive bid for the services of Japanese phenom Daisuke Matsuzaka; they actually won! Their $51.1 million dollar bid eclipsed even that of the mighty Yankees (who, according to reports, were also outbid by their cross-town cousins, the Mets), and that Tuesday night announcement certainly ruined dinner time in Camp Steinbrenner.
Now, before anyone gets too excited about…well…one of the most exciting pitching prospects to come along in years actually donning a Sox uniform, we still have to sign him, and, to do that, we have to go through the Devil, himself, Scott Boras. Boras will be pushing hard for a high dollar, three year deal (in hopes of getting his 26 year old client back on the free agent market in time for his 30th birthday), while the Sox will be looking to land his services for four or more years to maximize the value of their generous negotiating bid.
If the Sox and Boras do manage to strike a deal somewhere in the middle (say four years at $12 million per), the young right hander would ultimately cost the Red Sox upwards of $100 million dollars; and that’s before anyone even sees him throw a pitch against MLB quality hitters (outside of the World Baseball Classic, in which Matsuzaka turned in a gem of a performance). Break that down over four years and we’re talking about Alex Rodriguez money, here, which would make the unproven (on these shores) commodity the highest paid pitcher in the history of the game.
It’s hard not to get excited about Matsuzaka’s potential, especially in a rotation that would include Curt Schilling, Jon Papelbon, and Josh Beckett, but we’ve been in these situations before, where done deals were everything but actually done, and had the rug (as well as our hopes and dreams) swept out from under us. But, worst case scenario is that if both sides fail to come to an agreement, the Red Sox get their money back, the Yakult Swallows (Matsuzaka’s Japanese team) get their star pitcher back, and, perhaps most importantly, the Yankees get nothing at all.
The Boston Red Sox clearly weren’t kidding around when they said that they would work extremely hard this off-season in trying to wash away the bitter taste of the failed 2006 campaign. At first, with miniscule signings and deals featuring familiar names like Wakefield, Timlin and Cora, it looked like business as usual in the Fenway offices, but who could foresee this? Not only did the Sox make a highly competitive bid for the services of Japanese phenom Daisuke Matsuzaka; they actually won! Their $51.1 million dollar bid eclipsed even that of the mighty Yankees (who, according to reports, were also outbid by their cross-town cousins, the Mets), and that Tuesday night announcement certainly ruined dinner time in Camp Steinbrenner.
