NPB Tracker

This post is a little late — we’re officially in the second half of the season as the first post-All-Star games were played on Monday. The All-Star game is only a symbolic marker anyway though, as all the NPB teams have played at least 87 games out of the 144-game schedule. Still it’s a good time to take stock of the season that’s been played so far. Here are some thoughts conveniently split up into three categories.

A few general observations:

• The Central League is again a three-team race between Yomiuri, Hanshin, and Chunichi. This makes the playoff race somewhat uninteresting but the playoffs themselves should be good.
• The Pacific League is much more balanced, with SoftBank, Seibu, and Lotte nine or more games over .500, Orix even and Nippon Ham one game under. Rakuten is in the cellar at 40-49, but they have the second best pitching results in the league and could get into contention for a playoff spot if they start to hit.
• We’re seeing a strong performances from a number of starting pitchers.

Follow up from previous posts:

• The answers to my six storylines so far: no, yes, unfortunately not, maybe, yes/not yet, probably none.
• Yokohama is again a doormat. I thought they’d be a little more competitive this year.
• My rookies to watch are either injured (Yusei, Kazuhito Futagami, Takashi Ogino), fat (Ryoji Nakata) or Hisayoshi Chono (Chono).
• A couple of the imports I put on my watch list, Matt Murton and Kim Tae-Gyun, have taken off in Japan. Gio Alvarado is getting it together as well.
• The veterans I picked to watch have mostly been duds, which isn’t a surprise as I deliberately listed a bunch of guys with question marks. That said, Yoshinobu Takahashi is having a nice bounce back season, Aarom Baldiris has contributed some a performance to Orix, and Sho Nakata is showing some signs of life.

NPB Tracker mid-season awards:

• My first half MVPs: Central League – Kazuhiro Wada (Chunichi), Pacific League – Hiroyuki Nakajima (Seibu)
• First half Sawamura Award winner: Kenta Maeda (Hiroshima)
• First half RoYs: Central League – Chono (Yomiuri), Pacific League – Ogino (Lotte) despite missing significant time on the injured list
• Breakout players: Central League – Shun Tohno (Yomiuri), Pacific League – T-Okada (Orix)

I normally don’t pay much attention to the All-Star Game, but this caught my attention.

Yu Darvish unveiled a new pitch called the “gyro-cutter” in his All-Star appearance this year. According to the linked article, he had just shown it in practice on the 21st. Said Darvish: “it’s the first time I used it in a game. It’s one type of cut fastball. Just the trajectory is different from what we’ve had until now.”

Here’s a YouTube clip I found of Darvish throwing the pitch against Giants catcher Shinnosuke Abe. The pitches shown in this video are numbers 13-22 of Darvish’s appearance, if you’d like to check out his velocity chart for the game. The pitches show up at cut fastballs in the data I collected.

Abe had this to say about the at-bat, which resulted in an RBI double: “it’s like a rising pitch from a submariner. I tried with all my might to outlast it with foul balls.”

So what’s “gyro” about this cut fastball? The spin. The Gyroball is supposed to spin sideways toward the plate, rather than rotating top over bottom. I think the best example of the pitch’s grip and trajectory can be seen at about 0:40 of the video. I own a copy of Gyroball originator Kazushi Tezuka’s book, but I haven’t read it, so take what I’m saying here with an appropriate measure of salt. In any event, Abe had a good at-bat and looked capable of fighting the pitch off.

Looks like the Chiba Lotte Marines are bringing Keiichi Yabu in for an audition on July 26. Last time we heard from Yabu, he was training in Arizona and hoping to play in a US-based independent league. If Yabu has anything left in the tank, I expect Lotte to sign him.

With Yuki Karakawa and Shingo Ono on the shelf, Lotte’s rotation has been short staffed. Bill Murphy stepping into a starting role has been a boost, none of the other options tried –Ryoji Katsuki, Yuji Yoshimi, Bryan Corey — have stuck. Karakawa should be back soon and Hayden Penn is on his way, but a little extra depth never hurt.

Sponichi tells us that the Hiroshima Carp are wrapping up a deal with Vinnie Chulk. There have been rumblings about this on this side of the Pacific as well, and the Carp could use a bullpen arm with Mike Schultz on the shelf following hernia surgery. Chulk will join Hayden Penn in moving from the Pirates organization to Japan.

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.

Last autumn, I compiled a list of guys who I thought would be good candidates to play in NPB this season. A couple of them made it over, most did not.

I didn’t rank my selections, but there were four guys that I liked better than the rest. One of them was Matt Murton (easy for me to say now, yes); let’s take a look at how the others have done Stateside this season:

• Mike Hessman – having a 3A career year with a .985 OPS, but missed time with a stress fracture in his right hand, and is just beginning to rehab.
• Lenny DiNardo – was having a typical DiNardo 3A campaign with a 3.52 ERA and plenty of groundball outs, but has been on the shelf since late May, I believe with a hamstring injury.
• Kevin Frandsen -bounced from San Francisco to Boston to Anaheim, and is currently on the Angels’ 25-man roster. My FanGraphs colleague Marc Hulet gave his work with the Angels a moderate thumbs up a couple weeks ago. For what it’s worth, I kind of saw Frandsen as a spiritual successor to Bobby Rose in Yokohama.

Suffice to say, none of these guys will be playing in Japan this season. The July 31 player acquisition deadline is looming, and more than half the NPB teams have looked outside of Japan for reinforcements, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Hayden Penn turned out to be the last.

I’ve always meant to write about the culture of Japanese baseball, I figure two years in to blog I might as start. More importantly, Orix’s recent signing of Francisco Caraballo gives me an excuse to start one of my favorite things about Japanese baseball, the douage.

Ideally, this is more of a late-season post than a mid-season post, but what the heck.

The word douage (pronounced “doh-ah-gay”) doesn’t have an easy English translation. The most succinct translation I can come up with is something like “honoring an individual by tossing up and down in celebration”. The Japanese word itself, 胴上げ, comes from dou (胴), “torso” and age (上げ), “raise” or “lift”. Every year, Japanese baseball teams douage their retiring players, and championship teams douage their managers after clinching a pennant, playoff series, or Nippon Series.

But douages aren’t just for big wins and retirements. Caraballo’s BC League teammates and opponents sent him off with a douage. Keisuke Mizuta’s Seibu teammates did the same when he was traded to Hanshin last year (note, I didn’t actually watch the video in that link). And Deanna caught an on-field wedding on her trip to Niigata, in which the BC League players feted the groom with a douage.

Looking at more typical douages, the most significant one of last year was for Katsuya Nomura, who retired as the manager of Rakuten after a life-long career in baseball. Both Rakuten and the opposing Nippon Ham Fighters took part in the celebration. Masaaki Mori’s 1987 Nippon Series douage is a famous one, but it’s mostly remembered for Kazuhiro Kiyohara breaking down and crying with one out left in the game. And finally, here’s one for my Brewers-blogging FanGraphs bud, Jack Moore: when Ken Macha retired from the Chunichi Dragons in 1985, he was presented with a bouquet and douage’d (farewell ceremony starts at 5:10), a real rarity for foreign players.

A few notes on NPB’s sukketo-tachi, all in Japanese.

• Retired Cuban slugger Omar Linares, who spent the last few years of his career in Japan with Chunichi, is returning to Japan as a coach for Cuba’s entry in this year’s World University Baseball Championship.
• Hanshin is saying they’re going to keep both Craig Brazell (30 HR) and Matt Murton (.351 AVG) for 2011. Brazell will be a free agent and figures to get a hefty raise from the $800k he’s earning, while Murton, according to the linked article, has a second year on his contract which is structured as a buyout. I’ve seen this referred to in other articles as an option, which I guess is functionally similar. Either way, the team gets to choose whether to keep him in 2011, though a buyout suggests there is a payment attached if they don’t. That would seem to make it even more of a no-brainer.
• Speaking of Murton, he and Kenji Johjima visited the Osaka University Children’s Hospital on their off-day Monday.
• Brett Harper is off to a torrid start in Japan — 10 for his first 21 with 3 HR. Here’s a pic of him connecting off Kenta Maeda on the 13th.
• Orix has placed new signee Francisco Caraballo on it’s regular roster, and passed on signing Hyang-Nam Choi.

Update on Penn: Pirates beat writer Dejan Kovacevic has tempered the Penn discussion a bit, saying that it’s only an inquiry so far. Here’s a more complete translation of what originally appeared in Sponichi: “Team representative Ishikawa has traveled to America and is in the midst of negotiations. It appears that an agreement is impending, with an official announcement to happen following a decision on the acquisition.” Originally that was one Japanese sentence but I busted it into two for readability.

A couple of items to note as we inch toward NPB’s July 31 player acquisition deadline…

• Just as I praise the Orix Buffaloes for a series of out-of-the-box moves, they go and make another, signing outfielder Francisco Caraballo out of the independent Baseball Challenge (BC) League. Caraballo hadn’t played higher than 2A ball in America, but moved to Indy ball in Japan last year where he lead the Island League in home runs (18) and RBI (76). This year he was hitting .364 with 15 HR and 46 RBI in 37 games for the Gunma Diamond Pegasus of the BC League. Thanks to the always-on Passer By for the tip on this one.
• Meanwhile, Chiba Lotte is closing in on an agreement to bring in Hayden Penn, who is currently playing for the Pirates’ 3A affiliate. Rotation depth is Lotte’s weakness, particularly with Yuki Karakawa on the shelf, and the Marines have a foreign roster spot to allocate, so another starter is a sensible acquisition.

A year or so ago, I came across a Japanese-language blog called something like “Orix saiken heno michi” (オリックス再建への道), which means “the road to rebuilding Orix”. I’d link to it if I could find it again, but I was unable to.The title pretty much explains the content of the blog, and the content of this post as well.

Aside from a somewhat improbable run to a 2nd place finish and playoff birth in 2008, Osaka’s second team has been serially uncompetitive since the 2004 Orix-Kintetsu merger. After last season, the team replaced manager Daijiro Ohishi with former Orix Blue Wave player and Hanshin Tigers manager Akinobu Okada, and kicked off another rebuilding effort.

Orix has had more than its share of tribulations this year, most notably the tragic suicide of Hiroyuki Oze, and the more recent passing of team dormitory master Toshio Hohya. Despite that, the team stands at a competitive 39-39 record as of July 7, thanks largely to a 16-8 run in interleague. Part of the team’s success has been due to the rather large number of acquisitions and roster tweaks Okada and the front office have made.

Offseason and Pre-Season Moves

• Selected five college/industrial league/independent league pitchers in 09 draft: Okada’s stated strategy was to rebuild the pitching staff with more experienced amateurs. He stayed out of the Yusei Kikuchi race and got his top choice, Shuichi Furukawa, uncontested. Two ’09 draftees, Furukawa and Toru Anan (5th round), have already made their ichi-gun debuts.
• Let Tuffy Rhodes walk: I’m already on the record as calling this a bad move.
• Traded Yasunari Takagi to Yomiuri for Hiroshi Kisanuki: I loved this deal for Orix when it happened, and it’s been a home run for them so far. Kisanuki has been a reliable starter, throwing 100 innings of 3.87 ball, and is headed to the All-Star game. Takagi hasn’t made an appearance for the Giants.
• Signed Aarom Baldiris: Baldiris showed he could play the field from his time with Hanshin, but he never hit enough to keep a regular ichi-gun job with Kansai’s other team. After starting this season on the farm, Baldiris has taken over third base and is hitting .297 with a .766 OPS through 164 PA’s. We’ll see if he can keep it up.
• Signed So Taguchi: Taguchi spent his NPB career with the old Blue Wave version of Orix, before his eight-year stint in MLB. At 40 years old, he’s basically what he was in the States: a useful, if slightly below-average outfield bat off the bench.
• Traded Masahiro Abe to Seibu for Shogo Akada: I’ll call this spring training trade a wash as neither player has performed well with his new team.
• Signed Freddie Bynum: Another spring training move, it looks like Bynum has lost out to Baldiris, and is buried so far down the foreign depth chart that it’s unlikely we’ll see much more of him this year.
• Committed a regular spot in the lineup to T-Okada: The presence of manager Okada led to the player formerly known as Takahiro Okada adopting the fan-suggested T-Okada moniker. It’s worked out pretty well, as he’s sporting an .857 OPS with 17 HR in his first season of regular duty.

In-Season Moves

• Traded Takehito Kanazawa to SoftBank for Hisao Arakane and Keisuke Kaneko: Another two-player return for a non-contributor. Kaneko has been a non-factor so far, but Arakane has hit .295 though his first 88 at-bats. I’d be a little surprised if the 32 year-old fringey veteran keeps it up though.
• Saw Satoshi Komatsu get healthy: He started the season in the bullpen, and overall doesn’t look the same to me as he did in his fantastic 2008 season, but Komatsu has kicked in 56.1 innings of 3.04 ball.
• Traded Yuichiro Mukae to Hiroshima for Masayuki Hasegawa and Go Kida: it’s hard not to love this trade for Orix — they turned a career .177 hitter into a guy who can at least handle pinch hitting duties, and a once-promising righthander who can still be effective if healthy. Kida’s value as a bench bat is somewhat negated in the DH-using Pacific League, but Orix got a big return on Mukae. Supposedly Hiroshima really wanted Naoyuki Ohmura.
• Signed Fernando Seguignol: Seguignol comes full-circle, having spent an unproductive season with the Blue Wave way back in 2002. Seguignol was signed to provide injury depth behind Alex Cabrera, but only appeared in six games before being sent down.

So not every move Orix made has worked out, but there are plenty of wins in this list. I still think Orix will settle to the bottom this year and miss the playoffs, as they just don’t have the star power to compete with the rest of the Pacific League. But they’re making it interesting.