A year ago, when the San Diego Padres signed Yu Darvish to a six-year contract, the pitcher asked AJ Preller, the boss baseball operations, if his contract was going to handcuff his own.
Basically, his question was whether the Padres were going to have the money to try to sign Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. This is what he clearly asked his boss.
And Preller told him that no, that was not going to slow down the club, which had only just added Xander Bogaerts to the roster for 11 years.
Darvish was very happy.
But in one year, you know like I do that things have changed. The Padres' on-field failures and the club's financial problems changed plans.
The death of owner Peter Seidler was the final straw, causing the Padres to fall into “save money” mode instead of spending.
Result? The Padres were never named in the Yamamoto and Ohtani files. No meeting was arranged between the Padres and these guys, who went to Los Angeles.
And according to what Darvish himself said in an interview, it pained him to see that the Padres did nothing to stop them from going to the enemy.
Even though Darvish pitched in LA in 2017, he wants to do everything to beat the Los Angeles team. He finds it a shame to see that San Diego is once again becoming the small club behind LA
And he'll cry even more if Roki Sasaki also goes to LA in a year. Sasaki is the next Yamamoto on the mound from Japan.
All over Japan, we see people reporting the words of Darvish, who does not seem in the best state of mind at the moment.
We can understand it: the rest will not be easy in San Diego…
His dream of creating a Japanese powerhouse in San Diego is dead (actually, he's alive…but in Los Angeles) and Darvish will have to fall back on Yuki Matsui, a closer Japanese who signed in San Diego.
But it won't be the same, we agree. It was not with Matsui that he wanted to leave the Japanese subsidiary with the San Diego Padres – with all respect for Matsui.
