DownSwinging.com

The second the Washington Nationals took Stephen Strasburg with the first overall pick in this year’s MLB first-year player draft, everyone knew the Nats were going to be locked in negotiation with Strasburg’s agent, the infamous Scott Boras. Because most consider Strasburg to be major league-ready immediately, Boras has cited another major league-ready pitcher, Daisuke Matsuzaka, as the benchmark, and is looking for a cool $50 million for Strasburg. Now, Strasburg isn’t going to get that much money, but that’s not going to stop Boras from trying to squeeze everything out of the Nats he possibly can, and he certainly doesn’t have any problem advising his clients to walk away from the MLB and try again next year.

This time, however, Boras might have a new plan. According to the Washington Post, Boras is considering sending Strasburg to Japan for a year. The benefit to this would be that after playing in Japan for a year, Strasburg would be considered a professional, and could potentially be treated as a free agent. Now, there a number of legal difficulties with this solution, (which would be resolved in court, because Strasburg is not a member of the union) which I’m not going to go into now because they are described in detail in the article above.

But let’s assume for a second that the roadblocks are gone, and that this is a legitimate possibility for Strasburg, which I suppose it might be. Assuming that, I still don’t see why Strasburg would want to do this at all, for him, maybe not for Boras but for him. Most experts said they expected the Nationals to make an offer between $15 and $20 million. Now while I certainly can’t throw a baseball quite as well as Strasburg can, we’re about the same age, and that seems like a hell of a lot of money to me. Regardless of that still, Strasburg has a lot to lose. Say he has a bad season, or gets hurt, or just doesn’t live up to expectations. With a young pitcher, you really never what’s going to happen, I know Strasburg is the second coming of the Messiah and all, but I’m sure some freak accident could happen to him too.

I highly doubt this would be an easy transition either. Moving to Japan would be difficult especially for a kid his age, and I don’t think his teammates would be too appreciative of this young kid taking advantage of their league to try and make a few more bucks over in the US.

And while this wasn’t mentioned in the Post article, I have to wonder if for an MLB team to sign Strasburg, they would have to pay a posting fee, and that would surely cut into the amount of money they would be willing to pay the young pitcher.

While Boras may simply be floating the idea as a threat, the bottom line is that the option only provides a lot of risks and hardships for Strasburg. And it’s not like Strasburg is going to be coming up short signing with the Nats, the dude is going to make big money. Ultimately, I think Strasburg will sign with Washington, but if he even considers Japan, he is just being short-sighted.