No, you're completely wrong about this. If there's no agreement with the Sox, DM goes back to Japan for another year. There's no "reposting" or "sliding down to the second best bid." So before you accuse me of having "biases" because I -- and many others here -- grasp that this process is part of a larger whole, maybe you should read up on it a bit.
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It seems to me that your posts in this thread demonstrate precisely that you
don't understand that this process is "part of a larger whole." You seem bent on ignoring the participants' knowledge of the system in your rush to an imaginary moral highground. Like I said before, examine your biases, as you're flying off the handle here without any apparent reason.
If you have some reason to believe that such payments are disallowed in NPB please explain yourself, but this sort of thing is pretty common in MLB, especially around trade deadline time. The details are a bit different, but plenty of players receive inducements from their current team to agree to play for another team, sometimes paid through the new team in the form of an extension.
There's absolutely nothing morally, ethically, or legally wrong with an employer paying an employee for a service within the agreed upon scope of employment, at least in US law. Japanese law tends to be less restrictive in such matters, though I'd have to track down a Japanese employment lawyer to make sure this specific case was okay in Japan.
All the stuff about IRS reporting and luxury tax is fine, but it's not particularly relevant to this situation.
The Red Sox aren't giving Seibu money to give to Matsuzaka. Any inducement to reach an agreement is already in place, and part of the process. Money paid from Seibu to Matsuzaka isn't from the Red Sox, it is from Seibu. There's no circumvention of the luxury tax because the terms between Matsuzaka and the Red Sox are irrelevant to the negotiation between Matsuzaka and Seibu. If you think about it for 5 seconds you'll realize that
no matter what contract the Sox offer, Boras will demand money from Seibu in order to agree to the contract. The Sox have leverage over Matsuzaka, Matsuzaka has leverage over Siebu, and Seibu has leverage over nobody, but a $51M inducement to facilitate a deal. This isn't some last minute surprise wrought by fraud and deception -- it's how the system was set up. All parties involved made their decisions with full knowledge of the system, both of its written and unwritten rules, so no one has any reason to cry foul. (Which is why, from what I can tell, nobody is.)
If the sox turned around and agreed to pay Seibu 5M/y and Seibu agreed to pay Matsuzaka 5M/y but the contract between the Sox and Matsuzaka was for the league minimum, that would be different. It would certainly violate the CBA if the Sox didn't count it towards the luxury tax, and Matsuzaka would have to report it as income in the US. That is a very different dynamic from the one at work here, for the reasons mentioned above.
Thanks for the info on posting, though. I didn't know a player could only be posted once in each Nov->March window. That'd be a good bit of info for BB-ref to add to their page on the subject, as it makes Boras' position much stronger.
