Farewell, Super Slider
Last week, over at the mighty fine (Japanese language) Carp Blog, I learned that veteran righty Masaki Hayashi is calling it a career. Hiroshima released (via senryokugai) Hayashi after the season, and decided to retire after failing to draw any interest with his participation at an offseason tryout.
Hayashi spent his 11-season career in Hiroshima’s bullpen, and while he was never dominant or even really consistently effective, he did have one distinguishing trait: a great slider with big, late movement.
(here’s another video)
Hayashi could run his fastball up into the 147-148 kmph range in his earlier years, so he had pretty good stuff. It didn’t quite translate to NPB dominance, but he was fun to watch. According to the Carp Blog, he’ll take a position the Carp’s front office.
30/12/2011 at 1:27 am Permalink
Great slider sure, but between this and the Darvish videos I’ve seen; it appears many Japanese hitters have poor plate discipline and/or two-strike approaches. Any truth to that, or just perception?
30/12/2011 at 10:35 pm Permalink
That’s a pretty small sample size. I think there’s some truth to your observation though, probably more so on two-strike approach than plate discipline.
30/12/2011 at 11:16 pm Permalink
I tend to agree on the two strike approach as well, which is strange given that Japanese players usually exhibit great fundamentals.
Random: I use Google Chrome as my browser. Sometimes when I visit your pitching data pages it asks me if I want to translate it from Swahili to English fairly often. For giggles, I clicked on it, and nothing changed. Strange.
30/12/2011 at 11:43 pm Permalink
Random: I use Google Chrome as my browser. Sometimes when I visit your pitching data pages it asks me if I want to translate it from Swahili to English fairly often. For giggles, I clicked on it, and nothing changed. Strange.
That’s interesting. I use Chrome almost exclusively to deal with the site (occasionally FF, on Linux) and I’ve never seen that.
31/12/2011 at 12:49 am Permalink
Hmmm, I wonder what sort of issue I’m having. Interesting. May never know.
31/12/2011 at 10:01 am Permalink
It’s the names of the players. Google thinks these are in Italian:
http://npbtracker.com/data/player.php?p_id=202
http://npbtracker.com/data/player.php?p_id=200
Something about “fumi” I guess.
07/01/2012 at 2:15 pm Permalink
In the clip provided, Hayashi’s slider looks a lot like the SF Giants’ Sergio Romo’s, a sharp sweeping slider.