A small update to last night’s small update on the status of 25-year-old Korean lefty Hyun-jin Ryu. He is being posted by his team in Korea (a process by which MLB teams submit a single, sealed bid for the right to negotiate a contract with Ryu – whoever bids highest gets that right), and bids were due yesterday at 4pm CT.
As expected, the Chicago Cubs did indeed submit a bid for Ryu, whose team, the Hanwha Eagles, will now sort out all of the bids, select the highest (if it’s high enough), and then inform MLB of the winner. The process could take several days, and we might not know if the Cubs won the bid until next week.
How much did the Cubs bid? Who else bid? Well, we can only guess on the former – I’ve seen estimates anywhere from $5 million to $25 million, which is to say: no one knows – but the Dallas Morning News reports that, in addition to the Cubs, the Rangers, the Dodgers, and the Red Sox are believed to have submitted bids.
So now we play the waiting game. Ryu is not expected to be a game-changing import in the way that Yu Darvish was, but he is believed to be a capable big league starter, who could represent quite a bargain if he sticks as a number 3/4 starter for the next few years. In other words, the Cubs winning the bid on Ryu would be very good news (assuming they can then reach an agreement with him). Perhaps not quite on the order of landing Jorge Soler, but definitely in the Gerardo Concepcion range (at the time of acquisition) – and we were all pretty excited about that one.