NPB Tracker

A couple of debuts and a new NPB record to share. Today’s articles will require your Japanese language skills, or the Fish.

• Orix continues to work on its roster, bringing in 23 year-old Venezuelan pitcher Freddy Ballestas in for an audition. Ballestas spent 2005-09 with the Phillies organization, never pitching above high-A, and had played Indy league ball earlier this year. If Orix signs him he’ll be their eighth foreign-born player.
• Speaking of Orix, Francisco Caraballo is already with their ichi-gun team, and homered in his debut game on July 19. Here are the highlights on YouTube, skip to 7:11 for the Caraballo bomb.
• 47 year-old Kimiyasu Kudoh was promoted to Seibu’s top team on the 18th, and made his first appearance on the 20th. Kudoh is only slightly too young to have worn Seibu’s retro uniforms when they were new. If they were using an 80′s throwback uniform he could have supplied his own.
• Another notable promotion is the Giants bringing up ikusei alumni Levi Romero. He made his debut on July 19, in a mop-up time appearance against Yakult, keeping his fastball around the magic 150 km/h mark.
• Jason Standridge threw a two-hitter for Hanshin on the 19th.
• One of my players to watch this year, Sho Nakata, finally hit his first career ichi-gun home run on July 20. Nakata has missed time this year with injuries, but maybe he’ll show a little of the form that he used to hit 30 ni-gun home runs last year.
• Chunichi has assembled a streak of five straight shutouts, establishing a new NPB record at the expense of Hiroshima and Yokohama. The Dragons’ collective scoreless inning streak stands at 47, five away from the NPB mark of 52. The MLB mark was set way back in 1903, when the Pirates ran a string of six consecutive.

Eric Stults’ is indeed heading to Japan, with the Hiroshima Carp emerging as the victor for his services. According to the Chugoku Shimbun, Stults gets a salary of about $700k plus performance bonuses, with a $50k signing bonus and and option for second year. The apparent loser in the Stults derby, the Hanshin Tigers, is apparently set to add Jason Standridge.

I don’t know what happened with the negotiations, but this is the second time in recent memory the Tigers didn’t get the pitcher they were after: during the offseason, Rakuten beat Hanshin to the punch on Juan Morillo. I wonder if the fact that more of Hanshin’s acquisition targets get leaked to the media than any other team has something to do with that. Or maybe they’re naming guys that they really aren’t interested in.

Anyway, getting Stults is an interesting move for the Carp. Rotation depth is a good thing for any team, and the Carp lost Colby Lewis in the offseason and have Kan Ohtake on the shelf. But if I had to pick an area for the Carp to improve on, I’d say their lineup could use a little more pop. I really liked the Andy Phillips acquisition last season. And adding Stults does introduce a roster squeeze for the Carp, as they’ll have to choose which four of Stults, Giancarlo Alvarado, Mike Schultz, Justin Huber and Jeff Fiorentino to carry. Still, this gives them the chance to carry the guys who are contributing the most regardless of position.

Hanshin getting Standridge was a little bit of a surprise for me. Their big issue right now is instability in their rotation, and I’ve always thought of Standridge as a reliever… but that’s kind of a mis-perception on my part. He started in Japan with SoftBank a couple years ago, and has starting experience at several minor league levels. Apparently one of the things Hanshin likes is that he has Japan experience and knows a bit about what’s getting into. According to Nikkan Sports (linked above), Hanshin was looking at guys on the fringes of MLB rosters, but wanted someone who they could sign and have on board quickly, to get the team through April and May.

If waiting was an option, they might have taken a look at Cleveland lefty Jeremy Sowers (my own speculation here). Sowers is a polish/command starter who has been back and forth between the Majors and 3A for the last four seasons. He’s never had any trouble putting up strong 3A numbers, but outside of some initial success hasn’t been effective at the MLB level.

Coming: Justin Germano, Kameron Loe, Chris Aguila, Arihito Muramatsu, Brian Falkenborg, manager Koji Akiyama

Going: Jeremy Powell, Rick Guttormson, CJ Nitkowski, Jason Standridge,  Michael Restovich, Naoyuki Ohmura, manager Sadaharu Oh

Staying: DJ Houlton

Trending: neutral

Synopsis: SoftBank didn’t get much out of it’s foreign roster in 2008, hence the high turnover. The Hawks had reportedly been after Eric Hinske and Nelson Cruz, but so far haven’t landed either. Germano and Loe should be useful pieces, and a bit more MLB-caliber than the guys they replace. The Hawks did get the worse of the Muramatsu-Ohmura trade with Orix.