NPB Tracker

Orioles fans, while you’re here — anyone interested in seeing recent Baltimore acquisition Ryohei Tanaka’s NPB minor league stats?

It’s a little work to get ’em, and if no one’s interested I won’t bother.

Sports Hochi is reporting that Toronto has agreed to terms with another Japanese lefty, former Yomiuri Giant Shigeki Noguchi. Noguchi was once one of the best pitchers in Japan, taking the 1999 Sawamura Award and MVP with 19 wins for the Central League Champion Chunichi Dragons. He’s never recovered his old form since missing most of 2002 with an injury, and didn’t pitch at the top level at all in 2008. 

Noguchi gets a minor league contract and will take part in the minor league camp, and start the season in AA or AAA. Definitely a low risk acquisition for the Jays.

The news of Ken Takahashi’s minor league deal with the Blue Jays is already out there, so I’ll add a few details courtesy of the online edition of the Chugoku Shimbun.

• One-year, minor league deal with a spring training invite
• Team will provide a personal trainer/translator
• The team will evaluate him as a starter
• If he makes the major league team and meets all incentives, his salary will be about $1.5m

The deal is final once the visa paperwork goes through. If Takahashi does indeed make the team, every AL East team will have a Japanese player on it’s roster.

Ken Takahashi may be getting close to finding a destination. Word out of Japan is that he’s in final negotiations with four teams — previously, the Cubs, Mets, Blue Jays, Orioles, and Phillies had been noted as interested in his services. His agent is fighting to get him a major league deal, and expects to have an announcement in a week at the latest. He’s been quoted recently as saying he’d come to America “under any circumstances“, which the Japanese media has interpreted as a willingness to accept a minor league deal. One thing that hadn’t been previously reported is that he also had offers from three NPB teams, which he turned down.

The story of Yoshinori Yamarin, which I followed a bit around draft time last year, has come to a conclusion with the young pitcher signing a minor league contract with the Braves. Sanspo has the details in Japanese, complete with a picture of him in a Braves hat that appears to be two sizes too small. Yamarin went unselected in last October’s NPB draft, but reportedly reaches 92 with his fastball, and has some projectability at 6″1, 187. He’s certainly not nearly as polished as Junichi Tazawa, and will begin his Braves career in an instructional league in Australia.

トロント・ブルージェイズの番記者のジョーダン・バスティアンによると、ブ軍は海外でのスカウト活動を強化しており、“日本人投手”と交渉中のようだ。僕は、これは高橋建じゃないかと推測している。先週、移籍先としてカブスが浮上したが、メッツとフィリーズも興味があるようだ。

Disappointing Texas Rangers reliever Kazuo Fukumori is aiming for a comeback in 2009. “In the state that I’m in now, I won’t get a contract to play anywhere next year. I want to be promoted to the majors, and then attract calls from Japanese baseball too next offseason,” Fukumori was quoted as saying in Sports Hochi. Fukumori put up an ugly 5.48 era in AAA last year, but also suffered from a herniated disk which he had operated on in October. He says he isn’t feeling any discomfort at this point, but will still start spring training in the Rangers’ minor league camp.

Update, mid-day Jan 22: The Cubs introduced Kadokura today, here’s a pic of him in his new Cubs gear.

So who is Ken Kadokura? 

Prior to signing with the Yomiuri Giants for the 2007 season, Kadokura had been a serviceable swingman type for 11 NPB seasons. He lost the plot a bit in his two years with the Giants, kind of like Terry Mulholland’s mid-90’s stint with the Yankees. I haven’t followed Kadokura closely over the last two years, but I haven’t found any evidence that he’s been injured — if anyone has any let me know. Wikipedia puts his absence from the top team in 2008 down to non-performance: Kadokura failed to break camp with the top team, but was recalled in April ’08 to fill a middle relief role. On May 17 he blew a game in the 10th inning, and afterward was demoted again, never to be recalled. He spent the remainder of the year starting for the Giants farm team, posting a 3.21 era over 75 2/3 innings, with a 72/14 k/bb ratio. Minor league numbers don’t mean much to me, but he did pitch the whole year and didn’t suffer from any publicly-announced injuries.

Kadokura had a decent pre-Giants career. He’s crossed the 100 IP mark six times in his career, and boasts a respectable 1146 K’s in 1276 career innings. He’s also given up 1296 career hits, and given up his share of home runs, so take that with a grain of salt. I’m not sure what he did differently in 2005, which was by far his best season. The last article I have on his stuff is from 2006, and it says he mainly throws a fastball, forkball and slider, and gets his fastball up to about 90 mph. Maybe I’ll dig around my Shukan Baseball collection a little more over the weekend.

Kadokura was teammates with Cubs outfielder Kosuke Fukudome for the 1999 season with Chunichi, and it’s been speculated that providing Fuku a little support over the course of the long season may have played a role in this signing. I obviously don’t know if that’s true or not, but to me this is a sound baseball move.* We’ve seen a solid trend of NPB relievers performing well in MLB, Kadokura might benefit from having a more consistent role, and the Cubs current regime seems to be able to get the most out of their pitchers. Given that this is a minor league deal, there’s very little risk involved, and if it helps Fukudome out somehow, that’s all the better.

I’d like to share a video of his work here, but the only one I could find was this on of him getting nailed in the chin with a line drive off the bat of former Cub Pedro Valdes during the 2001 season, when he was a Kintetsu Buffalo teammate of former Cub Tuffy Rhodes.

*I guess I should re-iterate that Kadokura is on a minor league deal, and certainly a depth guy for the Cubs at this point. I do think we’ll see him in the bigs at some point this year, even if it’s when someone goes down with an injury.

米べスボール・アメリカによると、前巨人の門倉健はカブスとマイナー契約結んだ。詳しいこと出ていないが、招待選手として春季キャンプに参加すると思います。

According to the venerable Baseball America, the Cubs have signed former Yomiuri Giant Ken Kadokura to a minor league contract. I’m sure Kadokura will get a spring training invite and chance to compete for a bullpen spot.