to the United States, a Japanese press report said Monday.
Darvish wouldn’t be the first Japanese pitcher in the United States. But he would be the first Iranian baseball player here.
Darvish is the top-ranked pitcher in Japan. American teams have been salivating to sign him up. But when he started playing in Japan six years ago, he said he had no interest in moving across the Pacific. Now, all that has changed.
US agent Arn Tellem will negotiate with US major league clubs while Don Nomura paves the way in Japan for the 24-year-old right-hander to leave the Nippon Ham Fighters, his current team, the Tokyo Chunichi Sports daily said Monday.
Darvish became the first pitcher to win 15 games this season in Japan when he shut out the Softbank Hawks 4-0 in a Pacific League game Friday. It was the fourth time in five seasons that the Iranian-Japanese, who joined the Fighters in 2005 after snubbing American scouts and graduating from high school, has reached 15 wins.
Buying Darvish’s services will cost whatever US team gets him more than $80 million, the daily estimated.
But it is a complicated process under what is called the “posting system.” That system was set up in 1998 to regulate players’ transfers from Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) league to Major League Baseball (MLB) clubs in the United States to ensure the Japanese teams receive compensation if they lose their star players.
Under the system, MLB teams must submit bids in order to win the right to negotiate for 30 days with players who are “posted” by their NPB teams for
trans-Pacific transfers. If a posted NPB player signs a contract with an MLB team during the 30-day period, his Japanese club receives the bid as a transfer fee.
Darvish told a newly drafted teammate last year that he had “only one year” left playing for the Nippon Ham, the daily said.
“It has become difficult for him to keep himself motivated” at home, it quoted a person close to Darvish as saying.
Where Darvish will end up in the United Stats is anyone’s guess at this time. The New York Yankees, New York Mets and Detroit Tigers are among several American teams that have been scouting Darvish for years.
Darvish’s mother, Ikuyo, met his father, Farzad, at Eckerd College in Florida, where Farzad played soccer.
The Fighters, owned by the Nippon Ham Company, could get a quick infusion of cash by posting Darvish. Many sports teams in Japan have been feeling the pinch of the economic downturn, and the Fighters are no different. In a move seen by many as cost-cutting, Nippon Ham is the only team in Japan without foreign position players this year—although it does have three foreign pitchers backing up Darvish.
The 6-foot-5 (1.96-meter) Darvish is huge for a Japanese player, has superb control and seven effective pitches, including a two-seam fastball introduced last season. It’s assumed he would make a top-of-the-rotation major league starter.
One concern for US teams is his pitch count—the number of pitches a player makes in a game before being rotated off the mound. Darvish has often surpassed 140 pitches. Numbers like that would be unthinkable in the United States, where pitch counts of 100 are strictly adhered to.
“The pitch count is a bit of a concern,” Darvish said. “But up until this season, I wasn’t a high pitch count pitcher by Japanese standards, so I try not to worry about it too much.”
