But Ogino clearly gave up more in the 9th inning than KobaMasa and I don’t even think KobaMasa was that great a closer in the first place. Yabuta was fantastic though. I’m really sad that he had such a tough time in the MLB.

Also curious, of course, how many of those runs in the 5th and 6th innings were the fault of Hiroyuki “the other” Kobayashi. He had quite the tendency to just run out of steam and give up when I was watching him, it seemed.

That’s why I’m doing it.

As for the YFK thread, I’m going to refrain from commenting for now. All I will say is that that was the one that I was most on the fence about.

To support this, I’ve taken her suggestion and (re)compiled inning by inning scores over the past two seasons:


Year 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2007 77 83 64 71 65 71 68 85 32 9 1 3
2008 86 71 79 80 80 90 72 48 47 6 2 1


8th inning run hemorrhaging has been closed off. In fact, they gave up 18 less runs in the 7th, 8th, and 9th in 2008 than in 2007. This data does support the idea that the impact may have been less than what I had perceived. I don’t think that this tells the full story, though. How often did the bullpen blow a lead and such? I think I still have some data mining to do to be fully convinced.

Still, it looks like it’s been the starters who have caused the most trouble, not the relievers.

Overall, it’s nice to see someone write about this issue in a reasonable manner supported by real observations. This is in hard contrast to the typical emotionally filled, doom and gloom, mass exodus, talent drain drivel that one typically sees on this topic by the mainstream North American press.

That’s something I’m going to get to at the end, after I look at a few more years of movement. I’m gonna do a separate post for conclusions, hopefully after getting more comments like yours.

Another point is that a guy like Iwamura was replaced by Aaron Guiel, who put up 90% of Iwamura’s numbers, but then that was a foreign player slot that couldn’t be used to strengthen the rotation or fill another hole.

I can’t remember exactly where — Westbay might have run the numbers on it, or someone else — but I swear I saw someone show that Lotte gave up more runs in the 7th-9th innings than any other team in Japan. I could probably run the numbers myself given a bit of time to do it. Bobby himself even remarked that taking away his entire bullpen to the majors really hurt.

Essentially what he did, though, was he just stuck with Kawasaki and Ogino for the whole year, telling them “Look, you guys are the new setup and closer. I’m counting on you. If it takes leaving you in there to get shelled a few times for you to learn how to do this job… so be it.” In other words, preparing them for NEXT year, somewhat sacrificing this year to the Seibu juggernaut.

They did improve in the year, but man, I remember early on in the season seeing the MVP guys in the RF stands holding up a banner that said “Ogino — Inspire the Next Inning”, which was supposed to be a play on the Hitachi slogan “Inspire the Next”, since Ogino was drafted out of Hitachi. The problem is, what the banner literally meant was “give up the lead so that the game goes into extra innings”, of course. And it seemed like several times, we saw Ogino do exactly that. Sigh.

By the way, though, as a side point — you’re kind of analyzing this all per team, but what do you think of the idea that taking the best players out of the LEAGUE makes the overall competitive level lower? Pitchers who get better results and better numbers now that they don’t have to pitch to guys like Iwamura, Fukudome, etc? Batters who no longer have to face Matsuzaka, Kuroda, etc?

(Undoubtedly, pitchers no longer even remotely fear the heart of the Fighters lineup like they might have back when it was Guts-Seggy-Inaba-Shinjo, of course, though that’s beside the point.)

I have a particular pet pitcher in the Tokyo Big 6 University League that I keep meaning to write a long ode to, but part of the caveat is always that “anyone in the Tokyo Big 6 League gets to clobber Tokyo and Rikkio, therefore you can’t believe any of their strikeout stats” — but this guy put up unreal numbers this year WITHOUT facing Tokyo or Rikkio, so I count that in his favor. It’s just that rating the competitive balance of the league is hard to do in general.