MASA-HERO: Tanaka, seen here celebrating his record-breaking 21st-consecutive victory in Japanese professional baseball, might just be what the doctor ordered for the aging and injured Yankees. Photo courtesy AP
Masahiro Tanaka, the greatest thing to come out of Japan since Sony Electronics according to his hype, has decided to sign with the New York Yankees. The deal? A cool $155 million over seven years.
To compare, Clayton Kershaw, who HAS thrown a baseball in the major before and has won two of the last three NL Cy Young awards, got $215 million over the same time span in his deal with the Dodgers earlier this month.
Tanaka’s pitching across the Pacific can only be described, in a word, as “filthy”. Last season he went 24-0 with a 1.27 ERA. Still, though, the Rakuten Golden Eagles (his Japanese team) are light years away from the Bronx Bombers.
And highly-hyped Japanese-imported pitchers have a nasty boom-or-bust streak with them. For every Yu Darvish, there’s a Daisuke Matsuzaka (aka Dice-K) who never quite panned out. And with the standard practice in the business being paying now for performances not yet delivered, the Yankees have to sort of now cross their fingers that Tanaka is worth the average of $22.14 million a year that they’re paying him.
Another concern might be the shelf-life of Tanaka’s arm. At only 25, the same age as Stephen Strasburg, Clayton Kershaw, and Aroldis Chapman, Masahiro Tanaka has already pitched in 175 games for the Rakuten Golden Eagles since 2007, 53 of which he pitched a complete game.
In other words, he has almost 100 career professional wins overseas and he’ll still have to pay extra insurance if he wants to rent a car here.
Still, the news is sensational for the Yankees, who missed the postseason for only the second time since 1995 last year and have spent most of the offseason shrouded in controversy as Alex Rodriguez, who is banned for the entire upcoming season, continues to make headlines in reference to PED’s.
Tanaka will now join a rotation also staffed by C.C. Sabathia, Hiroki Kuroda, and Ivan Nova.
