Yu Darvish: Wait, Do I Actually Have To Root *For* The Yankees?

So, it continues to look like Yu Darvish, who is en route to posting his fifth consecutive full season in the Japanese baseball leagues with an ERA under 2, wishes to play in America next year. That probably means that he'll get his current team in the Japan Leagues to "post" him. At that point, MLB teams who are interested get to submit sealed, secret bids to that team, the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, for the right to negotiate with Darvish, and the team with the highest bid wins those rights. They then get 30 days to negotiate a contract with him, and if no deal is signed he goes back to the Fighters (who could in theory post him again, if there's still time). Now, since I've heard of Darvish-san I've been rooting pretty damn hard for the Mets to get him, and with various of the Wilpons' legal troubles looking like they're being resolved in a positive way (for the Wilpons) that rooting is getting even stronger. But there is, as always, one major problem in such a plan: the Yankees.


The Mets are a reasonably big-market team, and if the legal troubles are resolved then they have about as much money as anyone. That means that, if they openly assess what the maximum amount they'd be willing to pay for the opportunity to talk to Darvish, the number they come up with has a decent chance of being high enough to win. Except, that is, for the fact that if the Yankees ever want to, they can just blow everyone else out of the water. So the question is, will the Yankees want him?

On one level the answer would seem pretty obviously to be yes. Not only is Darvish apparently amazing and not only are the Yankees so fabulously wealthy that they don't have to think twice about his price tag, but starting pitching is also by far their #1 need. Their projected rotation for 2012 is CC Sabathia (if he doesn't opt out), A.J. Burnett, Phil Hughes, Ivan Nova, and... who? I honestly can't tell, looking at their organizational depth charts, who would be their fifth starter. There are a handful of AAA-level prospects with decent-looking numbers, but I (proudly) don't know the Yankees organization well enough to know which of them are top candidates for promotion. So they need pitching, and best I can tell Darvish looks to be the best option to fill that need.

On the other hand, I think there might be reasons why the Yankees might not go after Darvish with all their might. Specifically, they haven't had the best of experiences with Japanese players. They've had three of them play at the Major League level over time: Hideki Matsui, Kei Igawa, and Hideki Irabu. Of the three, obviously Matsui was the best, being in particular outstanding in the postseason for the Yankees though only kind of so-so in regular-season play. Igawa was an enormous disappointment, performing below replacement level for the Yankees and having been featured in a recent article about how badly he got treated by the organization. Irabu was in-between: he had one awful year for them, followed by two decent ones, and was then traded for Jake Westbrook. Which worked out horribly for the Yankees, but still.

So there are reasons, I think, why they might be a little bit hesitant to go all-in on a Japanese player as a centerpiece of their team. Attempting to do so hasn't typically worked out well for them. But still, they do need pitching. This puts me in the somewhat strange position, as a Mets fan, of discovering that if I want there to be a realistic chance of Darvish coming to the Mets next year, I need for things to go well for the Yankees regarding their starting pitching over the next half-year. Specifically, A.J. Burnett but especially Phil Hughes and Ivan Nova have to pitch well enough that the Yankees don't want to take away their rotation spots, and ideally the Yankees would also develop a genuine interest in some other reasonably big-name free agent starter. There are lots of them coming onto the market in the offseason: Mark Buehrle, Edwin Jackson, Jason Marquis, Joel Piniero, C.J. Wilson. Normally I would automatically root for the Yankees to fail to land any of those names, but in this case I have a rather strong incentive to hope that they do ultimately sign one of them. Because while I don't like the sound of Sabathia/Buehrle/Hughes/Burnett/Nova, if all are pitching well, I really like the sound of Santana/Darvish/Niese/Gee/Dickey.

Now, this being the Yankees I'm talking about, I kind of doubt that I will actually be able to react positively to, for instance, an 8-inning scoreless performance from Phil Hughes. But it's still kind of a strange dynamic.