DARVISH

DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRVISHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Seriously, hurry the fuck up.  Meanwhile, chew on this:  Baseball America released their top 10 Jays prospects today, with Travis d'Arnaud ranking #1, unsurprisingly.  Read here.

8:15 ET: MLBTR tells us that the Jays are in on Matt Garza and Gio Gonzalez, because both guys are pitchers.  Basically, people are saying "well if they don't get Darvish, they're going to want to give up some assets for pitchers.  I'm not so sure, but whatever.  I kind of think that they'd be more likely to give up some assets and grab a Gio or a Garza if they get Darvish, as a kind of a means of moving the plan forward.  Because if you think about it, why would they get Darvish and still then not be good enough to win this year?  What looks better? Romero-Darvish-Morrow-Alvarez-[Cecil/Mcgowan/meh] or Romero-Darvish-Garza-Morrow-Alvarez?

8:20 ET: Some Knobler guy tweets that it might be another 3-4 hours before we find out.  At least we know that the Nippon Ham Fighters will definitely be accepting the high bid and will post Darvish.  This Knobler guy also kind of looks like Danny Devito in the most recent season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is in no way a compliment.  Nevertheless, that tweet was about an hour ago, so that's a bit of a silver lining.

8:35 ET: Some light reading on Jays #2 prospect, Anthony Gose, courtesy of Arden Zwelling of Sportsnet.ca

The Nationals are looking at Gio Gonzalez, which should obviously drive up the price for he and Matt Garza, should the Jays become truly interested in either.

8:50ET: New Dark Knight Rises trailer, this time without the bottom 70% of the screen ripped off.  Once the Darvish excitement wears off, this should take over.


To watch more, visit tag

8:55 ET: OMG OMG OMG Kevin Gray of that Graymatter blog thing writes that AA has called a press conference to announce that the Jays have won the bid and negotiating rights to Yu Darvish.  Lettuce be cereal.

9:03 ET: Jon Morosi just shit on that.

9:08 ET: More waiting room magazine stuff... Victor Conte of Barry-Bonds-steroids fame says that Ryan Braun is fucked.

9:13 ET: Gotta pee.  BRB.

9:22 ET: Kevin Goldstein of baseballprospectus.com tweets a bunch of stuff about Darvish's actual ability, and figures that Darvish will likely need to ditch his curveball, and that he probably won't throw his changeup anymore either, since he rarely threw it in Japan, presumably because it's his worst pitch.

9:35 ET: Gray just tweeted again that the Jays are the winners....

9:55 ET: Well he hasn't rescinded it yet.  He actually says that there is a source who is publicly claiming that his tweet is true.  More at 10 ET, according to his source, who appears to be this guy?  Either way, the process is as follows: Nippon Ham announces that they accept the bid, and then MLB announces the team who had the high bid.  Then we all either go crazy and touch em all Joe, or it's a sad, sad day for baseball.

10:05 ET: Stoeten says that the twitter account linked above is that of the NH Fishercats' pitching coach, as if he'd have any idea/publicly come out with it.  Let's forget about this one, and about Gray in general for tonight.

But then there's this tweet, in which someone claims that Sportsnet plans to make an announcement in an hour-ish.  I don't see any announcement from Sportsnet quite yet, but that's obviously my next stop.

10:30 ET: This seems legit, though I don't really know.  Currency value has changed the worth of the $50MM USD compared to the Japanese Yen from ~Y6B to ~Y4B over these past 5 years, despite a nearly identical bid in both situations.

10:54 ET: A fake Bud Selig twitter account has claimed that the Jays have won for $52MM.  Shut up.

11:00ET: 10 minutes away, according to a Shi Davidi tweet.  Watch the end of wrestling and then come back.

11:13 ET: Yahoo Sports' Jeff Passan thinks the Rangers win.  Passan is a really good source, so it's probably right, but I wouldn't call anything official quite yet.  For what it's worth, MLBTR has hardly posted anything as far as rumors go until this Passan thing came out, so I think it's pretty likely that this is legit, but there's always a chance.  And you know what, fuck it.  That's $100MM+ that can go towards not having a painful albatross contract, 1 year after losing the Vernon Wells clustershit.  More coming.

11:37 ET: Thoughts, in no particular order.

• Well Kevin Gray has lost pretty much all credibility, at least for now.  He's apologized on twitter, but meh.  A lot of people are now considered idiots based on this whole thing, and more are coming on various comment sections and blogs over the next few days.
• It would have been really cool if the Jays won it, just to see something new and exciting in Yu Darvish pitching for us every 5th day, but this is far from the end of the world.
• $51.7MM is the rumored bid.  If the Jays went to $52MM, plus presumably another 55ish for the actual contract, that's over $100MM on top of their current payroll.   It's really hard to justify/rationalize any anger about this whole scenario.  If you're mad about the Jays not boosting their expenses by $60MM this season, in a year where they aren't certain to compete for the division, even with Darvish in the mix... well, I don't really have a whole lot to say to you.  I still trust what AA and Beeston have going on.
• Along those lines, if people are mad about the Jays not spending, why does anybody think that they were the favorites this whole time?  Can anyone really blame them for not spending?  What was the plan here, if they weren't spending?  Do people actually believe that the Jays weren't really a threat to sign Yu?  Or that they weren't close to the Rangers' bid?  $50MM bid is too cheap, but $52 would have been fine?  I challenge anybody reading this who are mad about Rogers not spending enough to explain themselves.  And to fuck off.
• I forget the name of the GM in Arizona, but if I were him, I'd be thrilled.  He signed Jason Kubel to a 2 year, $15MM contract this morning or last night or something, and has apparently invested something like $36MM across 7 players who were worth 3WAR last season.  Or something like that.
• Tonight's twitterage was fun as shit, no matter the result.  Silver lining: there's a Leaf's game tonight, and there was Monday Night Football, and Yu Darvish and the Toronto Blue Jays were still generating massive amounts of buzz.
• I'm so curious as to what the Jays bid was.  We'll probably never know, however.
• I still think it's more likely that we see young prospect starters get a chance to start and show what they can do, as opposed to going out and getting someone.  That appears to be a pretty unique point of view, based on my twitter feed (Shi Davidi and Gregor both seem to think that AA is still going to look for an upgrade to the rotation), but really, I don't see much point in going after a Garza-type if all it's going to do is get the Jays closer to contention but not all the way there.  Had the Darvish thing gone down, I think making a trade makes way more sense.