The deadline for submitting blind bids for the right to have your owner's wallet sodomized by Scott Boras expires at 5pm EST today. The winning bid -- not the winning team -- will be disclosed to the Seibu Lions who will have four days to accept or reject the offer. I suspect it will take something less than four days for the Lions to come to a decision, and the early estimates are that the final bid could be $20 million or more.
My feeling is that if Omar Minaya and his staff have evaluated Daisuke Matsuzaka as the best available starting pitcher then the Mets will go out there and blow everyone away with a bid that is above and beyond what anyone else is willing to pay. That is Minaya's M.O.: he see ssomething he wants and he goes out and gets it. If the Mets are lukewarm on Matsuzaka then I expect the Mets to make a lukewarm bid just to appease fans and the media and will then turn their attention to whatever pitcher or pitchers they have rated higher than D-Mat.
The deadline is just a half-hour away, though, like the Virginia senate race, it may be awhile before a winner finally emerges.
If you want more information on Matsuzaka, I wrote something of a profile on him at MetsGeek earlier in the week.
UPDATE [5:09pm]: The posting deadline has officially passed, which means that the commissioner's office has all of the final bids from teams interested in signing Matsuzaka. Now we play the waiting game.