Matsuzaka winning bid: Red Sox, $51.1m
DMZ · November 14, 2006 at 5:50 pm · Filed Under General baseball
I know, but please, close your mouth before the flies get in.
This is, by the way, approximately 1/4th the value of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays franchise.
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78 Responses to “Matsuzaka winning bid: Red Sox, $51.1m”
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#48: Would it be better for the Red Sox to have given up two or three top prospects (Lester and Papelbon quality) to get a guy like this in trade?
Money is the cheapest resource for the Yankees and Red Sox. I’m still trying to get my brain around the amount of money involved, but I understand the principle: no prospects, no draft picks, just cash.
Sorry, the $42 million figure was from an hour or so before that on the Sox site. Maybe it’s been updated since then. Anyway, newsday is now saying the Mets bid was $40 million.
#47: NY Times is going with the $51.1m figure. It may not be accurate, but this tells us it’s fit to print.
The M’s already had a strong presence in Japan. Someone else on SoSH said he watched 2004 ALCS games in Tokyo and the Red Sox may as well have been the visitors for all the japanese fans around him cared.
Gammons’ ESPN Insider blog sited by #38 has insight into Sox’ reasoning which Gammons would plausibly have). Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, the sheer quantity of Kool-Aid consumption in that FO en route to this course of action kiboshes notions this is a blocking ploy.
Basically, it’s the three factors you’d imagine:
1) Dice-K is 26, young for FA pitcher of any nationality, the same age as Beckett and Papelbon.
2) Sox want to make big splash in Japanese (and, later, Chinese) player pool, which they say “will change everything.”
3) Sox marketing minds covet merch/marketing yen, exporting the Rivalry to Japanese shores as Godzilla v. Matsuzake, and “selling Wally the Green Monster T-shirts from Tokyo to Kobe.”
To recap: Sox get a young starter and Japanese icon; Seibu gets the money; and Japanese fans get 19 wee hour lessons in American ballpark civility and Wally thr Green Monster on t-shirts. Sweet.
At 14 hours ahead, a 7 pm start time becomes 9 am and a noon or so finishing time for the games. Doesn’t sound bad on weekends but not too productive on weekdays.
As others have said, the posting fee is a relative nonissue for a team that has yet to milk the Japanese market (unless Matsuzaka breaks his arm or bombs totally).
I’m really looking forward to DM pitching here. I was (and am) a *huge* Nomo fan. How many people know he pitched in the White Sox system (Columbus Knights) last year?
At the end of the season Nomo pitched his no-hitter in Baltimore, a Japanese sports rag ran a cover story on Nomo. A sidebar titled “Next Hero” – in English – was about Matsuzaka.
As for making back all that money in Japanese revenue – um, maybe not. Boston Globe says all such revenue would be evenly distributed across ML.
Gammons says the M’s may have to share East Asia from here on out:
When Theo Epstein left the Red Sox last fall, after he turned down the Dodger job, he worked with two Japanese teams as a consultant. Epstein believes in the next decade the mass of baseball talent coming out of Asia will alter the landscape, and his owners want to be entrenched in Japan as well as China; they signed three prominent Taiwanese prospects this spring, and are looking into establishing complexes in Taiwan and mainland China.
Link (Insider)
Sigh. On top of this, Billy Beane will have a full ballpark in Fremont fueling his payroll, Anaheim already figured out move itself to LA while staying put, and so methinks the M’s will be looking up at the AL West leaders for a long time.
As I understand it, some revenue is shared and some isn’t.
46 — nah, the real issue is that Seibu supposedly actually has been losing quite a bit of money the last several years (probably due to being out in freaking Tokorozawa). So at least this means they won’t completely go under without their biggest star… instead, they’ll fold three years later, just like the Blue Wave!
And yeah, it makes no sense to me, Redsox-wise. It’s not like you can possibly FIT any more people into a sold-out Fenway, and the overseas revenue doesn’t help them either. So what gives?
57 — I thought everyone knew that. Just like everyone knew about Tomokazu Ohka pitching a perfect game against the Knights… who are, by the way, in Charlotte.
#58: The Yankees (YES TV) apparently sell “chroma keyed” ads on the base of the backstop when Matsui bats (and probably when Ichiro bats, too, when the M’s visit that Rattrap That Ruth Built). US viewers get American ads punched in, Japanese viewers get Japanese ads, and apparently ballpark ad revenue is not shared among all 30 MLB teams.
There’s no way the Red Sox are selling $51m worth of chroma keyed ads when DM pitches. But like they say about the boat full of lawyers sinking to the bottom of the ocean, “It’s a good start.”
#61: Would Barry Zito make more sense, Redsox-wise? Jeff Weaver? Jeff Suppan?
Interestingly, it seems like it would probably be still well short of the largest soccer transfer fees but edging closer. It’ll be interesting to see where these posting fees go from here if nothing else.
so, wonder if the bids ar emade in yen …. Ichiro’s was said to be Y1.4 billion/$13,125,000
Question for Bud Selig: Is this activity in the best interests of baseball?
57, 61
Yeah Nomo pitched for Charlotte this year, but 3.0 innings. Also when did Ohka throw the perfect game, Pawtucket in ’00? Charlotte was a pretty interesting team this year with Haeger the knuckleballer, Tim Redding whoms seems to be somewhat of a sleeper and then Nomo.
#66: You mean, is extending the hottest rivalry (excluding M’s/Padres, of course) in American sports to Japan in the best interests of baseball?
I wonder if this means the BoSox will be serious about moving Manny this off-season. They may need to dump a little salary.
#69: Link
The odds of Manny Ramirez being traded by the Sox this offseason are not high. The odds that he would be traded to Philadelphia are even more of a longshot based on comments by Phillies GM Pat Gillick.
“I don’t know if he’s a headache we want to deal with,” Gillick told Philadelphia reporters yesterday.
Philadelphia has been mentioned as a possible destination in large part because Ramirez is comfortable with manager Charlie Manuel, who was the hitting coach in Cleveland when Ramirez played for the Indians.
“I don’t want to put that kind of pressure on Charlie, because if it didn’t work out, the public would think Charlie assured us he could handle the guy,” Gillick said.
61, 67. Hmmm. So others knew. Definitely sad when the Knights designated Nomo-san, a transition I didn’t think anyone else marked. (There’s a point when persistence becomes folly, a friend remarked at the beginning of that year.)
Really, if Nomo had bombed with the Dodgers, Ichiro would never have come.
Holy shit! Well, can’t really blame the M’s for staying out of this one…
You can charge them more.
#73: Red Sox have already announced 2007 ticket prices. For the vast majority of seats (non-premium), they aren’t going up.
All evidence is that the Red Sox are profitable wildly in excess of their costs, especially their payroll. The only thing that keeps them from really turning into the Yankees is Henry’s desire to keep the payroll within hailing distance of the payroll tax limit, as a favor to Selig. Thus they have an absolute ton of money sloshing around and can spend it on things like staggeringly expensive Japanese pitchers, above-slot money for draftees, and not raising their ticket prices.
Jeff Passan wrote a great article about this for Yahoo today – talking about this in light of ‘best interests in baseball’. It sums up in one quick column a lot of the comments in this thread. Here it is. Passan article
That Passan article is horrible.
That Passan article is horrible.
Um…not sure I ever can take seriously any article that touches upon “best interest in baseball”…that’s code for “these guys make too much money.”