Blue Jays Reportedly win Yu Darvish Sweepstakes

In a surprising turn of events it’s looking like the Toronto Blue Jays won the opportunity to speak to Yu Darvish about a contract in American baseball. It was thought that the bigshot teams like Boston and the Yankees were going to be at the top of the pack (and even the Nationals) but a different East team came out the winner. Could this be the piece of the puzzle that the Blue Jays are missing? Could that be a wildly overused analogy? The answer to both may be “yes.”

What does this mean for the Sox? Not much. We only lost out on a chance to import another star Japanese player. The Sox haven’t done that since Iguchi in 2005, which I reminisced about a few days ago. I even used the word “reminisce” in that article as well. Anyway, Darvish would’ve been a cool addition to our rotation but I think that’s all he would’ve turned out to be – a cool addition. You can never be too sure about how a Japanese player will perform in America. It’d be like McDonalds trying to sell rice balls. It could go well or it could tank, it all depends on the timing. Is Darvish ready for American baseball? He thinks so. Is American baseball ready for Darvish? We’ll see.

The Blue Jays aren’t American anyway… they’re Canadian…

The price it took to speak with the right-handed Darvish was probably considerably higher than Boston paid to talk to Daisuke Matsuzaka back in 2006. Darvish has a career 1.81 ERA in Japan. 807 K’s against 185 BB’s. These numbers speak for themselves but I’ll speak for them too by saying this guy is impressive. He could wreck the world of baseball if he pitched like that over here. Darvish’s career record in Japan is 58-22. Can you imagine if Jose Bautista and the rest of the Blue Jays actually had a good pitcher? This is starting to become a bunch of my jumbled thoughts on this guy so I’ll end it by saying that this could be interesting.

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