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.