Brewers have reportedly made a contract offer to Yu Darvish

The offseason is still moving slower than molasses on a cold day, but a thaw could be near. On Sunday (or Monday in Japan), Yahoo Japan reported that the Milwaukee Brewers had made a contract offer to pitcher Yu Darvish.

The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal later confirmed that the Brewers had indeed offered Darvish a contract.

We don’t know any details about the contract yet, like how long or for how much, but now we know there’s an offer on the table. And of course Darvish, the current king of cryptic baseball Twitter, tweeted about it, quote tweeting the original report from Japan.

Does the thinking face emoji mean he’s currently considering the offer? Does it mean that the offer doesn’t actually exist? Who knows. Darvish loves to keep everybody guessing, though. After this was tweeted in mid-January:

Darvish responded with this:

Everyone is theorizing that the Los Angeles Dodgers are that “one more team,” but that’s not confirmed. And even if the Dodgers are that team, that wouldn’t stop the Brewers from making Darvish an offer — especially when the free agent market is deathly slow.

It’s a little unexpected that the Brewers would make an offer to Darvish, but it’s exactly what they should be doing. They had a surprisingly strong showing in 2017, finishing second in a competitive NL Central and just one game out of the NL wild-card. After such a season, they should be building on that success, and signing Darvish is the perfect way to do that.

Plus, there’s really no better time to make a play for Darvish. With the market at a standstill, either the players aren’t getting offers they feel are worthy of their talent, or teams just aren’t making any offers at all. So Darvish has either received offers and not accepted them, or other teams haven’t wanted to take the plunge and give him concrete numbers. Either way, the Brewers have nothing to lose by offering him a contract. Now we just have to wait and see what Darvish does next.

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Liz Roscher is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at lizroscher@yahoo.com or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher

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