There is a great debate going on in the Yu Darvish Fanshot about if he would be worth the money that it would cost to get him. It is really enjoyable to see the different opinions, but I thought that a poll would be interesting.
Now I don't know what it would take to land him, with DiceK the Red Sox went nuts and over bid everyone by a long shot. Maybe they will do it again. There are a lot of deep pocket teams out there, then the Jays have pretty deep pockets too.
I'm going to use a $55 million posting cost and a 6 year, $15 million contract for the poll. I could be off on both but that adds up to $145 million, that's likely in the ball park.
For me? I haven't seen him pitch and, more importantly, playing in Japan, he doesn't have stats that I can easily quantify, so that would be too much money for me. To spend that much I'd like to be more sure of what I'm getting. He looks like a better pitcher than DiceK, but you won't know until he is here. Then if Alex and his scout said that he was worth that much, I really couldn't argue.
There would be benefits, outside of his play on the field. He'd bring us a lot of notice from Japan. I'm sure they would want his starts shown on TV over there. Toronto would gain some in tourism as well as the team picking up some extra ticket sales with folks coming from over there to watch. So the team would gain back some of that money. And, if he turned out to be great and led us to the World Series, he'd be worth every penny.