NPB Tracker

Update December 19: Nailed it.

No inside information, no sources, nothing but a pure guess here… I think the two top bids will be the Yankees and the Rangers, with the Rangers coming out ahead.

I thought that MLB clubs would be a little more cautious with Darvish than they were with Daisuke Matsuzaka, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case. The real drama, however, begins next week.

Edit: the Rangers fans on Twitter seem to be enjoying this. Remember, it’s a guess guys.

Each offseason, NPB teams release a raft of players. I’ve combed through the list and picked out a few guys that could have some upside ahead of them.

• Chih-Lung Huang — There were MLB clubs interested in Huang when he signed with Yomiuri out of Taiwan in 2009, but he preferred Japan. The Giants seemed bullish on him when he reached ichi-gun in 2010, but cooled off this year. His stuff wasn’t as advertised but at age 22 he may still have some upside.
• Marcos Vechionacci — Vechionacci signed an ikusei contract with Hanshin last offseason, then hit .255/.359/.436 in 128 ni-gun plate appearances. That line sounds alright to me, but I guess Hanshin’s management didn’t agree. I would guess he’ll wind up back in 2A or 3A.
• Dioni Soriano – Soriano is a graduate of the Hiroshima Carp Dominican Academy, and bounced around China and Japan’s independent Island League before signing with the mothership in 2009. He has shown more success than anyone else on this list, throwing a shutout against Hanshin near the end of 2010. Soriano has a good arm, but throwing strikes has tended to be an issue for him. At age 29 (on December 30) he’s not a spring chicken by baseball standards, be he likely still has a few decent years in front of him.
• Wilfreiser Guerrero — Another product of the Carp’s Dominican Academy. Admittedly I know next to nothing about Guerrero, other that than he walked a lot of guys at ni-gun. I’ve included him on this list based on the observation that MLB clubs turned former Academy-sei players Ramon Ramirez and Esmailyn Caridad into Major Leaguers pretty quickly.
• Wirfin Obispo — I’ve written quite a bit about Obi-chan, calling his very good 2009 season a “small triumph for player development” and lauding Nippon Ham acquiring him from Yomiuri as one of my two favorite trades of last offseason. Obispo made Nippon Ham’s opening day roster in 2011, but was lit up in the first week and banished to ni-gun, where he was unimpressive for the rest of the season. At his best in 2009, he had a 93+ mph fastball and hard slider. Obispo is playing Winter Ball this year in hopes of catching on with an MLB club.

As far as I know, none of these players has signed for 2012 yet.

Not much time to write today, but there’s still a lot going on. If you to chat about what I said about Yu Darvish, or Tsuyoshi Wada’s deal with Baltimore, please leave a comment.

And another minor bit of news: the Yokohama DeNA BayStars have granted Hiroki Sanada his release, so that he may pursue an MLB deal. Sanada was posted unsuccessfully last week.

I don’t have much to say here, I just think that Norichika Aoki will wind up with the Rays.

If the earlier news about Hiroki Sanada’s failed posting wasn’t exciting enough, we have more.

Yu Darvish is finally getting posted. He’s announced it on his blog, and I’ve translated below.

To all the fans, an announcement

At this time, Yu Darvish has decided to use the posting system.

 

Because I wanted to relay this to the fans first, I am announcing this here.

 

I greatly appreciate the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters Baseball Club.

 

Because we’ve only just begun the posting process, I can’t talk about the details now.

 

I wish to hold a press conference once everything is decided.

 

Yu Darvish

The posting period for Yokohama DeNA BayStars reliever Hiroki Sanada has quietly come and gone, with no MLB teams submitting a bid. This wasn’t exactly a surprise, for reasons explained earlier. Sanada is the third NPB player posted to fail to draw a bid following Akinori Otsuka in 2002 and Koji Mitsui (twice) in 2009.

A few notes to share as we await word on where Hiroyuki Nakajima will wind up.

• The Chugoku Shimbun reports that the Hiroshima Carp are working on signing outfielder Nick Stavinoha. As of Monday, Hiroshima’s inquiry to the MLB commissioner’s office was complete, and negotiations were making progress.
• Sponichi reports that the Seibu Lions are moving on Texas infielder Esteban German, as a means of replacing the departing Nakajima on next year’s roster.
• In other Seibu news, Nikkan Sports reports that the Lions have hired former Yakult Swallow Kevin Hodges to scout the United States. Currently international scout Tetsu Suzuki will take over as Seibu’s farm director.

Update: And it’s the Yankees. I wonder if he’ll sign with them.

Only a quick update needed here — As expected, Seibu is going to accept the high bid for infielder Hiroyuki Nakajima. This is all over the Japanese media, but I’ll choose the Jiji Press’s brief writeup, which says that Seibu will file the paperwork on the 7th (JST) and the winning team will be made public within the same day.

So we don’t know the winning team or bid amount yet, though the Giants and Brewers have both clarified that they did not bid. So who might the winner be? My first three guesses would the Mets, the A’s, and the Rockies. But I’m not really up on the infield needs of most of MLB, so those really are random guesses.

So unsurprisingly, I’m getting questions this offseason about how guys like Tsuyoshi Wada, Hiroyuki Nakajima and Wei Yin Chen project as MLB prospects. Truth be told, trying project established guys from NPB to MLB always makes me a little nervous. I don’t feel like I’m that great at it, so I decided to go back and look at my public track record, to give you the chance to decide if I’m worth listening to.

Here’s what I found:

• Koji Uehara — I was bullish on him when he moved across the Pacific; injury history had me questioning whether he could start; he was one of my favorite guys to watch in Japan and I’m glad he’s done well.
• Kenshin Kawakami — My synopsis was “mid-rotation guy you can win with“. In retrospect that was a little aggressive; he was more like a competent #4 guy before the Braves decided to bury him.
• Hitoki Iwase — I thought his stuff would translate to MLB, particularly after watching Scott Downs pitch; he obviously never moved to MLB.
• Junichi Tazawa — I really liked his stuff, but also expected him to hit a wall somewhere. He reached the majors before hitting a wall, which really impressed me.
• Ken Takahashi — I predicted “a little bit of an uphill battle” for Tak1, but also thought he could be a useful pitcher. He basically was for his year in the Mets organization, though his career ended immediately after returning to Hiroshima.
• Ken Kadokura — Remember when he signed with the Cubs? I felt like he had something left in the tank, but he wound up getting dropped by the Cubs at the end of spring training and went on to have a few good years in Korea.
• Hisanori Takahashi — I liked Tak2 a lot better as a reliever than a starter; that one turned out to be true.
• Ryota Igarashi — I don’t think I made an explicit prediction for Igarashi, but I thought he would do okay. He didn’t seem to trust his stuff in his first year, and though he did better in year two, he went from “effectively wild” in NPB to just “wild” with the Mets.
• Chang-Yong Lim – Like Igarashi I don’t know that I really made an explicit prediction for him, though I really liked his stuff. I still do. Lim is still with Yakult and not a free agent, and I doubt we’ll ever see him in MLB.
• Colby Lewis — I found reasons to be optimistic about Lewis in his return to the Rangers, but he certainly has exceeded my expectations.
• Tsuyoshi Nishioka — Over at Fangraphs, I called Nishioka a “Chone Figgins/Ryan Theriot type”. What I meant by that was that he could be an infielder who would get on base but have minimal power, and play decent defense. I didn’t see him flaming out in year one the way he did.
• Hisashi Iwakuma — Also at Fangraphs, I put Iwakuma’s upside at mid-rotation, noting he has to keep his forkball and he will probably regress some in innings pitched. I still mostly think this is the case, assuming he’s healthy. We’ll find out next year.
• Yoshinori Tateyama — I never published much of anything about Tateyama, though I have an unfinished draft still sitting on Fangraphs, where I intended to make the case that he could be an MLB ROOGY/righty specialist. There was little original thought there, as he was dominant against righties in 2010 for Nippon Ham. In 2011 he exhibited a similar split for the Rangers, with a 2.04 against righties, versus 7.71 against lefties.

I kind of set out to prove that I’m not that great at these predictions, so I was surprised that the results here actually weren’t too bad. I seemed to do all right with Uehara, Tak1 and Tak2, while I probably underestimated Lewis and over-predicted Nishioka. The Nishioka flop makes me worry that I don’t know how to project position players. I think overall though, it’s pretty clear that I tend to see the glass as half-full with these guys as prospects. I also noticed here was that I seem to look at specific skills and how they might translate, rather than trying to project specific stats. Maybe I’m more of a scout than a numbers guy at heart.

That said, there are plenty of things I’ve been wrong about, I just haven’t always had a platform like this to assert my wrongness. If NPB Tracker had been around, however, I would have told you that…

• …of the two Matsuis, Kazuo was the far better MLB prospect. I was a huge fan of Kazuo’s; I saw him as a five-tool player.
• …Kei Igawa’s changeup was going to be a good MLB pitch.
• …Nagisa Arakaki was Japan’s next great pitcher.
• …So Taguchi wouldn’t have anything to offer to and MLB club.

…and so on.

So you might see me make a few statements on how I think the 2012 NPB imports may perform after they cross the Pacific. I’ll let you decide the appropriate measure of salt to take them with.

Alright, so time constraints prevent me from writing as much as I used to, but the hot stove season remains the busiest time of year for NPB Tracker.

If you’ve got questions about this offseason, fire away, and I’ll do my best to answer ’em. Mileage may vary.