While the Rangers and Major League Baseball didn’t disclose the amount of the winning bid to his home team, the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, Yahoo Sports said it was a record $51.7 million. The highest previous negotiating fee for a Japanese player was the $51.1 million that the Boston Red Sox bid in 2007 for Daisuke Matsuzaka.
“It’s obviously a very exciting night for our organization, our fans, our community,” Rangers General Manager Jon Daniels said in a conference call with reporters Monday night. “It’s just the first step in the process, but it’s an important one. We hope that it will end by signing Darvish.”
The bid only gives the Rangers the right to negotiate a contract with Darvish. If they make a deal, Darvish goes to Texas and the $51.7 million goes to the Nippon Ham Fighters. (Japan’s Nippon Ham food company owns the team.) If Darvish and the Rangers don’t reach a deal, Darvish stays with the Fighters for another year and the money stays with the Rangers. The team and Darvish have 30 days to settle.
The Rangers won the league pennant in each of the last two years. But both times, they were beaten in the World Series. Earlier this month, they lost their top starting pitcher, C.J. Wilson, so they are in the market for a top flight pitcher—and Darvish is unquestionably the best there is in Japan right now.
Darvish, who had a 1.44 ERA last season while leading Japan’s Pacific League by striking out 276 batters in 232 innings, has a fastball that usually reaches around 95 mph (153 kph), according to Ben Badler, an analyst for Baseball America who studies scouting and player development.
“He has better stuff and projects better going forward than any pitcher who is a free agent this year,” Badler said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg news.
Darvish hasn’t yet played enough seasons in Japan to become a free agent and sign with the US team of his choice. Instead, he went through the blind-bidding process that has yielded mixed results for pitchers over the years.
Many commentators in the United States are down on Japanese pitchers and feel they can’t face the greater pace of American baseball. Japanese pitchers appear once a week while American pitchers are usually up every four or five days.
But many of the critics fail to note that Darvish, 25, is half Iranian and much larger—6-foot-5, 225 pounds—than the average Japanese pitcher. So he doesn’t fit the mold.
Curiously, Darvish is uniformly described as Japanese since he comes out of Japanese baseball. But if he comes to the Rangers, he will be the first Iranian ever to play in US Major League Baseball.
He is a fan favorite in Japan, one of the country’s biggest celebrities, and is likely to draw admiring women in the United States too. What’s more, he will be a marital free agent if he arrives. He is now going through a divorce from his actress wife.