Chris Cotillo, MLB Daily Dish's high school phenom, reported Monday night (after calculus homework, I assume) that an agent told him that the Toronto Blue Jays "are in for sure," when he was asked about the recent rumours that the Blue Jays did not put in a bid for Japanese pitcher Masahiro Tanaka. Of course, "in for sure" does not mean the Blue Jays will be the team Tanaka chooses to sign with, nor does it necessarily mean that Toronto even put in a bid. It just means that the agent knows (or has learned) that Toronto has been heavily involved somehow in the Tanakathon.
On the other end of the age scale, Richard Griffin of the Toronto Star reported Monday morning (probably not after calculus homework) that the Toronto Blue Jays were "not among the teams in consideration," but that the Blue Jays "[appear to be] quietly confident it can land one from that next group [of free agent starters]." Griffin included a tidbit later in the piece, writing that Anthopoulos "has a solid relationship" with the agents of Ubaldo Jimenez and Ervin Santana.
So, we're back to, "who knows?"... which it is what it has been all along, really. The deadline for Tanaka to choose his favourite contract will be 5 pm this Friday, so we still have three days of wild speculation left! And just to demonstrate the level of insanity that this Tanaka hype has reached, there were hundreds of tweeters running to translate this Japanese tweet from Tanaka:
決めれん(・_・;
— 田中将大/MASAHIRO TANAKA (@t_masahiro18) January 21, 2014
Cutting-and-pasting that into Google Translate spits out a somewhat nonsensical "It does is decided (· _ ·;" but that didn't stop twitter-ers from jumping to the conclusion that Tanaka had made a decision of what team he was headed off to. But of course, Japanese is a fundamentally different language than English, with very different syntax and all, which makes it prone to mistranslation. So I wasn't surprised when it was revealed by a Japanese speaker that it said exactly opposite of what everyone thought it said....
@RobertMurrayMLB tanaka had asked his followers to send a photo for his profile pic. A bunch came in, and he tweeted "can't decide"
— IchiroReport (@IchiroReport) January 21, 2014