It's kind of funny how people are trying to guess what Yamamoto wants and values and cares about, since none of us has any clue about that. Just something to talk about I guess, but it's pretty silly to try to decide what his motivation for choosing one place over another would be and then extrapolate that this is why he will or won't be signing with us. We just can't know any of that.
One thing we do know is that wherever he signs, he will be an extremely wealthy young star athlete, whose life will be vastly different than any of ours. Things about one place or another that would matter a lot to us probably won't matter to him at all.
For example, travel-- he's not going to be standing in line at the departure gate with us chumps, he'll probably be flying private chartered jets whenever he goes anywhere. If he wants family and friends to come visit, he can charter a jet for them. Or if he has a day off maybe he takes a luxury helicopter to some resort and back the next day. Things like the number of airline flights to Japan and back or whatever will be pretty meaningless.
Housing will be unlike what any of us have and unlike what most of us could probably even imagine. This city is dirty or that one has lots of traffic or crime, whatever. He'll have multiple luxury gated homes in the most exclusive private areas. Good restaurants of whatever type? He won't be eating dinner in the main dining room of many restaurants, he'll be using secret entrances and private dining rooms, when he's not having his personal chef make gourmet versions of whatever he wants whenever he wants. It's just going to be so different from any of our own experiences and preferences that's it's hard to imagine.
He'll be living the life of the super rich and famous. You can do that in any of the cities that are in on him.
We have Yoshida already here and they were teammates, maybe that's an advantage? Or maybe he always disliked Yoshida. Or maybe they were best buds, who knows? It could be a slight advantage in that at least Yoshida just made the same exact transition and now probably knows all the best places to live and eat and hang out when you are a super-rich young international celebrity athlete. Other teams will have people to recommend that too of course, but maybe it's better coming from someone you already know and who knows you. And Yoshida knows specifically how the longer season and longer travel can affect you and has just had to make some changes in his own training to deal with it. That would be nice to have from a guy you'e already played with, who speaks your language and has learned first-hand very recently about the challenges of moving from Japan to the US as a major league player.
But of course Yamamoto might not care about any of that either. Maybe other things are way more important to him.
The Red Sox are changing translators for Yoshida.
View: https://twitter.com/tylermilliken_/status/1711418909016858858
Is that good or bad in terms of trying to attract Yamamoto? No impact at all? No way any of us would know.
We can't know any of the actual motivations he has for making his decision. Maybe his parents gave him a Buster Posey t-shirt when he was 10 and it's always been his lifelong dream to play for the Giants.
Nobody knows nothing. (Too late, already posted when I was typing this long screed.)
