The Davis solution - Byung-ho Park

[weams]

Maybe they've hooked Park up with Cruz' diet and conditioning specialist.

You mean Bio-Genesis? They are closed. He got a new guy.

[abbott]

Total investment is expected to be over 50 million. That's a lot.

Do you think a 40M investment was a good value? I can't imagine the Orioles, who apparently bid, were thinking that they could get him for less 40.

Or do the Orioles bid with expectation that he will go elsewhere and do it so the casual fan will beleive the Orioles were interested?

[Can_of_corn]

Do you think a 40M investment was a good value? I can't imagine the Orioles, who apparently bid, were thinking that they could get him for less 40.

Or do the Orioles bid with expectation that he will go elsewhere and do it so the casual fan will beleive the Orioles were interested?

I don't think the casual fan has any idea who Park is. In fact I wouldn't bet that the average casual fan even knows that Korea has a professional baseball league.

[Stotle]

Do you think a 40M investment was a good value? I can't imagine the Orioles, who apparently bid, were thinking that they could get him for less 40.

Or do the Orioles bid with expectation that he will go elsewhere and do it so the casual fan will beleive the Orioles were interested?

The answer to this is you always post based on your own valuations. Then you negotiate the contract based on your own valuations colored by leverage at play. If you do not end up coming to terms with the player he doesn't get to play ball in the US this year. You do not gain anything by simply shrugging and sighing "someone else is going to bid more so why bother", except for the obvious situation where you value someone like Yu Darvish at a $10 MM bid (in which case it isn't worth the internal effort to go through the motions).

I believe casual fans care about the aggregate effort. Pointing to one bid and saying "see we tried" is irrelevant if the totality of the off-season is a failure to improve the club. Likewise, if you make some moves and go into next season with a good faith effort to compete, the casual fan isn't going to care whether you participated in a particular closed auction.