NPB Tracker

Yokohama finished up their offseason shopping last week, introducing Takayuki Shinohara and Daisuke Hayakawa, and announcing the signing of Termel Sledge. Here’s the complete list of BayStars acquisitions, which ran on Sponich and was helpfully translated on Yakyu Baka:

Pos	Player Name	Age	Previous Team
P	Shimizu, Naoyuki	34	Chiba Lotte Marines
P	Bootcheck, Chris	31	MLB – Pirates
P	Shinohara, Takayuki	33	Softbank Hawks
P	Sakamoto, Yataro	27	Nippon Ham Fighters
P	Matsuyama, Suguru	20	Nippon Ham Fighters
P	Sugihara, Yo	24	Nomo BC
P	Wang, Yi-Zheng	24	CPBL – Bears
C	Hashimoto, Tasuku	33	Chiba Lotte Marines
INF	Inada, Naoto	30	Nippon Ham Fighters
INF	Castillo, Jose	28	CPBL – Lions
OF	Sledge, Terrmel	32	Nippon Ham Fighters
OF	Hayakawa, Daisuke	34	Chiba Lotte Marines

That’s a decent group of players, but the key here is the guys they’ll be taking plate appearances and innings away from.

Yokohama has some decent core hitters (Shuichi Murata, Seiichi Uchikawa), but in 2009 they had too many positions that they got no offense from. In 2009, the ‘Stars had four who got over 100 plate appearances despite hitting under .200. Dropping the number to 40 pa’s reveals another four. The additions of Hashimoto, Inada, Hayakawa and Castillo should be a huge improvement over that group. A little improvement from younger guys like Keijiro Matsumoto wouldn’t hurt either.

On the mound, Yokohama only had one reliable starter (Daisuke Miura) in 2009, and only three relievers who threw more than 50 innings (Hiroyuki Sanada, Shun Yamaguchi, Kentaro Takasaki). To that end, Shimizu is a nice pickup. He’s really not the ace he’s sometimes billed as, but should absorb about 150 innings. The real improvements to the rotation, however, are already on the roster: full seasons from Hayato Terahara and Stephen Randolph. I see the bullpen arms ‘Hama acquired mostly interesting question marks — a former dominator who hasn’t pitched recently (Shinohara), a guy with a couple good seasons to his name (Sakamoto) and an American with good velocity but poor command at the MLB level (Bootcheck).

Finally, there is a feel-good story amongst this: Sugihara is a former Lotte farmhand, but was released after the 2006 season. He had been working at a Docomo mobile phone shop in Osaka and getting by on 80,000 yen ($800) per month while moonlighting with the Nomo Baseball Club, and now he’s getting another chance.

Is all this enough to get Yokohama off the cellar? We’ll have to see, but the BayStars should definitely be closer to the pack in 2010.

This ranking is based on calculating information from Daily Sports Online, and converting into US dollars at the April 24 dollar-yen exchange rate from Google Finance. The numbers are based on the start of the 2009 season. I hope this will be interesting and insightful for new NPB fans to learn how much Japanese teams pay their players.

• One note is that teams with more than 70 players on contract are from the existence of ikusei (training) players.

Japan cleanup hitter Shuichi Murata is out of the WBC with a pulled a hamstring, suffered rounding first on a single in Thursday night’s win over Korea. Despite replacing him in the game with scrub Yoshiyuaki Kamei, Japan won the game. Manager Tatsunori Hara has called on Hiroshima Carp infielder Kenta Kurihara to take Murata’s spot. Kurihara bats cleanup for Hiroshima but doesn’t have Murata’s power and hasn’t played much at third recently. 

Maybe Hara will have Kurihara DH and play Munenori Kawasaki or Yasuyuki Kataoka at third.

Japan manager Tatsunori Hara has settled on a WBC roster. Here it is:

Pitchers
Yu Darvish
Takahiro Mahara
Masahiro Tanaka
Hideaki Wakui
Daisuke Matsuzaka
Minoru Iwata
Hisashi Iwakuma
Kyuji Fujikawa
Tetsuya Utsumi
Satoshi Komatsu
Shunsuke Watanabe
Tetsuya Yamaguchi
Toshiya Sugiuchi

Catchers
Kenji Johjima
Shinnosuke Abe
Yoshiyuki Ishihara

Infielders
Hiroyuki Nakajima
Yasuyuki Kataoka
Akinori Iwamura
Michiro Ogasawara
Shuichi Murata
Munenori Kawasaki

Outfielders
Kosuke Fukudome
Norichika Aoki
Seiichi Uchikawa
Yoshiyuki Kamei
Atsunori Inaba
Ichiro

(SI has the AP article as well)

Notable departures are Nobuhiko Matsunaka (achilles problem), Kenta Kurihara (affected by elbow surgery last year), Toru Hosokawa (right shoulder pain), Tsuyoshi Wada, and Takayuki Kishi. Health reasons were not cited for Wada and Kishi.

Overall, the roster looks pretty good to me, though it’s somewhat short on power.The inclusion of Yoshiyuki Kamei makes no obvious sense to me, but I could see him as a defensive replacement/pinch runner. The only other questionable pick I see is Shunsuke Watanabe. He’s been hit or miss in NPB, and as I recall he wasn’t that great in the 2006 WBC.