Pirates placed the highest bid on Jung-ho Kang

Surprisingly, it was the Pirates who grabbed the exclusive rights to negotiate with Jung-ho Kang, a shortstop who hit 40 HR from KBO this year. It was known that the winning bid was $5,002,015, but due to the time difference between Korea and America, and the fact that it was during the weekend before Christmas, the winning team was not announced until today.

People (mostly Koreans) are worried about how much playing time Kang would get, but it seems like he will at least get some plate appearances from various fielding positions. His power and versatility are helpful in that sense. I personally like that the Pirates won the bid and I hope more people enjoy beautiful scenery of their PNC Park.

I do hope Kang and the Pirates sign a contract with a fair amount of dollars. How much would be fair, though? I looked up all the players signed their contracts through the posting system, from the baseball-reference, and there were 11 who agreed to a major league contract, 3 with a minor league contract, and 10 who failed to sign. If Kang fails to reach an agreement with the Pirates, obviously he will go back to KBO and earn tons of money, so I don't think he will consider a minor league contract.

So I took a closer look at 11 MLB signings. Clearly, Tanaka's was an outlier, because he was with the new posting system between MLB and NPB. For the remaining 10, I paid attention to their respective ratios between the posting fee and salary. For each player, I calculated the dollar amount for the team to pay him each year, and what percentage of it is from the posting fee. (See below)

The average was almost 47%, and 6 out of 10 were between 40% and 50%.

Player	Posting Fee	Contract	% Posting Fee
Ichiro Suzuki	$13.125,000	3-year, $14M	48.4
Kazuhisa Ishii	$11,260,000	4-year, $12.3M	47.8
Akinori Otsuka	$3,000,000	2-year, $1.8M	62.5
Shinji Mori	$1,000,000	2-year, $1.3M	43.5
Daisuke Matsuzaka	$51,111,111.11	6-year, $52M	49.6
Akinori Iwamura	$4,500,000	3-year, $7.7M	36.9
Kei Igawa	$26,000,194	5-year, $20M	56.6
Tsuyoshi Nishioka	$5,329,000	3-year, $9.25M	36.6
Yu Darvish	$51,703,411	6-year, $60M	46.3
Hyun-Jin Ryu	$25,737,737.33	6-year, $36M	41.7
Jung-ho Kang	$5,002,015	?	?

If we go by 36.6 (of Iwamura; Nishioka had a similar percentage and they both are infielders like Kang) Kang would expect a 3-year, $8.67M deal. If we go by 47.0 (average of 10 players) then he would be looking at $5.64M, and I hope it is a two-year deal rather than three.