Major League Baseball, flush with cash and enjoying a boom in popularity, has embarked on an odyssey this off season. Free Agents will find themselves wooed with the avalanche of cash being thrown at them. How else do you explain Mark DeRosa netting $13 million dollars for the next three years? He had a career year last year and. at the age of 31, isn’t likely to duplicate it. Frankly I would be surprised if he came close.

DeRosa is just the tip of the iceberg however. Danys Baez, one year removed from his career best 41 saves (2005, Tampa Bay Devil Rays) landed at Baltimore last night $19 million richer to set up Chris Ray.

Baseball is flush with cash and it seems as if the mantra for the next few weeks will be Let’s Make a Deal. Even the Japanese leagues are cashing in. Between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, over $75 million dollars was added to the treasury of two teams just for the right to negotiate a deal with two pitchers. The Red Sox, apparently deciding to fight fire with fire, out-bid everyone for a chance to sign pitching phenom Daisuke Matsuzaka when they offered a record $51.1 million posting fee to the Seibu Lions. It is expected Matsuzaka will get a deal in the 5-7 year range worth at least $13 million.

In New York the Yankees won the bidding for Japanese pitcher Kei Igawa by offering the Hanshin Tigers a posting fee of about $25 million, the Associated Press reported. Even the lowly Devil Rays got into the action, albeit at the low end of the scale. They paid around $1 million for the right to negotiate with 3B Akinori Iwamura.

[tags]baseball,fantasy,sports[/tags]