NPB Tracker

The SoftBank Hawks have signed 23 year-old righty Michael Olmsted to an ikusei contract. The former Mets farmhand worked out last for SoftBank along with JD Durbin, who also signed a deal with the Hawks. So the Hawks went two-for-two on that tryout.

Olmsted will be competing with SoftBank’s other ikusei players for a spot on the team’s 70-man roster. I recall reading that Durbin took the last spot on Softbank’s 70-man, so it’s possible that Olmsted won’t shed his ikusei status this season.

There have been a couple notable success stories among foreign ikusei signings: Wirfin Obispo chipped in 58.2 productive innings towards Yomiuri’s nippon-ichi team last year, and former Hiroshima Carp ikusei player Esmailin Caridad reached the majors with the Cubs last season.

It’s been a while since I’ve written any actual content about Japanese baseball… sometimes real life gets in the way. Let’s see if we can fix that, at least for now.

• The surprise of the season so far for me has been the performance of the Chiba Lotte Marines, who are neck and neck and neck with the SoftBank Hawks and resurgent Seibu Lions for the Pacific League lead. Lotte is getting it done in style too, leading the Pa-League in team runs scored, runs allowed, batting average and era. Will it continue? You have to figure that Kim Tae-Kyun and Tadahito Iguchi will cool off at some point, but they have a decent lineup 1-9. The pitching is a little bit of a concern too, as new manager Nishimura is letting some of his starters go a bit further into games than Bobby V used to. We’ll see if that turns into a problem down the stretch.
• Over in the Central League, it’s nice to see the Yokohama BayStars competing with a respectable 16-18 record so far. Yokohama is getting good production from a number of pitchers, including newcomers Naoyuki Shimizu, Shigeru Kaga, and Shintaro Ejiri. The ‘Stars are still struggling in spots offensively, but should be better over the course of the season by virtue of the sheer number of weak bats they took out of the lineup last offseason.
• Bridging the gap between those first two bullet points is the apparently impending trade of Yuji Yoshimi from Yokohama to Lotte. The big lefty was once a promising starter, but injuries derailed him for a couple of years and recently he’s been more of a middle-of-the-pack long reliever. Lotte seems to want him as a starter.
• And more on Lotte: reliever Hiroyuki Kobayashi has qualified for international free agency, and is reportedly likely to seek a move to the majors. This has come up before with Kobayashi so it isn’t exactly a surprise at this point. I could see him playing for the San Francisco Giants, if they have an opening for a righthander. Former Lotte man Shun Kakazu scouts Japan for the Giants, and Brian Sabean can be creative in putting together his bullpen.
• Former Hanshin lefty Jeff Williams wants to return to the Tigers as an active pitcher, but the Tigers want to bring him back as a scout. The idea would be for current scout Andy Sheets to focus on hitters, while Jeff would look for pitchers. Jeff certainly knows what it takes to succeed in Japan, but I would love to see him pitch for the Tigers again and eventually get a proper do-age send-off.
• Who will be this year’s Junichi Tazawa or Yusei Kikuchi? Maybe it will be Chuo University pitcher Hirokazu Sawamura, who seems to be eclipsing Yuki Saito in terms of media ink. The Giants and Mets each had a scout at Sawamura’s most recent scout, with Mets’ Isao Ojimi saying that it would “be a waste for him to say in Japan”, while the Giants’ Shun Kakazu said that he hit 97 on his gun. Draft Reports has a quote from Sports Hochi from February saying that Sawamura is favoring playing in Japan.
• Moving along to Kikuchi, the young lefty now known simply as Yusei struggled with both his command and velocity in his first couple ni-gun appearances, but showed signs of improvement on May 4th, when he threw five scoreless innings and hit 147 kmph (92mph) on the gun. Seibu is saying he won’t be promoted before the All-Star break, but could get a look afterward.
• Casey Fossum bought the PSP version of Pro Yakyu Spirits 2010 for his five year-old son, but was annoyed to learn that Konami made him pretty bad in the game, and vowed to use it as motivation to do well and be a better player in next year’s version of the game. Speaking of Fossum, he’s blogging about his experiences in Japan.
• Off-topic bullet point: I came across this essay about the state of Japan’s technology and IT sector (link to PDF file), and why it’s in trouble. It makes some good points, but overall I found it disappointing as it covers the usual tired criticisms of over-reliance on manufactured consumer goods and an under-developed services sector.

• Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-25: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-18: NPB Bullet Points: The Season Thus F… http://bit.ly/bkzrQf #
• $125 Million: Today, Ryan Howard signed a five-year, $125 million extension with the Phillies. Despite his flaws (… http://bit.ly/arTUpp #
• Dragons vs Carp: http://www.justin.tv/pinkzonbi#r=OTWbVUI~ #

Today, Ryan Howard signed a five-year, $125 million extension with the Phillies. Despite his flaws (200 strikeouts), Howard is a great hitter and run producer, and a lot of fun to watch. This deal seems excessive, but I don’t begrudge him for getting it. I will, however, take issue with this:

“I knew I wanted to stay in Philly,” Howard said in San Francisco. “I’ve grown so accustomed to the fans. It’s a special relationship with the fans. That wasn’t a very hard decision.”

(Quoted from the Sacramento Bee)

That isn’t exactly Mike Hampton claiming he signed with the Rockies because of Colorado’s school system, but who is he fooling with this type of cliche? I would love to hear one of these guys say “I signed this contract because it sets my family up for financial prosperity for the next few generations.”

• Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-18: NPB Bullet Points: The Season Thus Far: News and notes on the season so far… http://bit.ly/dtcpBC #
• Bullet Points: NHL Playoffs, Debuts: First a little diversion into hockey: the NHL playoffs are underway and my lo… http://bit.ly/bijDAJ #
• Colby Lewis Japan Stats: Every day someone winds up on this site from a search string like “Colby Lewis Japan Stat… http://bit.ly/cXuV4D #
• Three Quotes That Changed the Way I Think About Baseball: Rather than post something about the news tonight, I tho… http://bit.ly/cuiiKl #
• SoftBank vs Lotte, live: http://www.justin.tv/cpak00#r=OTWbVUI~ #
• Hanshin vs Chunichi: http://www.justin.tv/dra778#r=OTWbVUI~ #
• Orix vs Seibu: http://www.justin.tv/ouran#r=OTWbVUI~ #

Rather than post something about the news tonight, I thought I’d share a couple of insights that affected my view of baseball. I doubt the audience here will consider these revelations, but maybe they will lend some insight into why I write about what I write about.

1. When I was about 14 or so, my dad repeated to me something he had heard in an interview with Chad Curtis: “in baseball, you have to think about the process”. And I guess that that was a concept I sort of got prior to hearing that, but that was the first time I had heard it articulated so succinctly and it just stuck. Remember I was about 14 when I heard this.

2. A few years later, I was reading the letters section of Baseball America, and someone wrote in calling some prospect a bust. BA’s response was, and I paraphrase, “what do you mean he was a bust? He reached 3A and got hurt.” It dawned on me then that playing 3A is actually a sign of a pretty good playing career.

3. This last one is the only one I don’t have to paraphrase. John Sickels on former Cubs prospect Brooks Kieschnick: “In an alternate universe somewhere, the Cubs let him play in ’96 and ’97 and he ended up having a decent career.” I’ve always enjoyed John’s work, and his prospect retros are an elegant way of pointing out that every player needs a chance in order to be successful.

I’ve spent nearly my entire life to this point learning about baseball, and I think most of the knowledge I have has been accumulated over time. But these three ‘ah-ha’ moments stand out as things that immediately affected the way I look at the game.

Every day someone winds up on this site from a search string like “Colby Lewis Japan Stats”. So here they are, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Note: the formatting of the NPB Tracker blog is not conducive to publishing stats tables, and I don’t feel like messing with it, hence the link to the static html page.

First a little diversion into hockey: the NHL playoffs are underway and my local San Jose Sharks won the top seed in the Western Conference, and are off to an… interesting start to their first series. If you’ve paid any attention to the Sharks over the last few years, you know that they’ve made a habit of perennially flaming out in the early rounds of the playoffs. So I had modest expectations coming in, which I thought were realized with a rather lackluster game one. But in game two I saw a Sharks team that I haven’t seen in a long time. I can’t remember the last time I saw them play with such a level of urgency. And they took it up a notch in game three, completely dominating the puck in the second and third periods.

But the Sharks had their flaws in both games two and three: in game two they few chances they gave up were top-notch, and Evgeni Nabakov didn’t make any big saves in regulation; in game three the Sharks just couldn’t manage to score, despite getting 51 shots to the net, and eventually lost on an own-goal in overtime. The Sharks are clearly more talented than Colorado but have yet to really play a complete game.

Somewhere in an alternate universe, the Sharks kept their young players together, Jonathan Cheechoo never fell apart, and a team featuring lines of Joe Thornton, Cheechoo, and Devin Setoguchi and Patrick Marleau, Milan Mihalek, and Steve Bernier has played Pittsburgh in the Stanley Cup finals the last two years.

And while we’re on hockey, Janblurr put up a post last week on the state of German professional hockey and some of the issues currently facing the Deutsche Eishockey Liga.

On with the bullet points…

• On April 18, Hanshin’s Tomoaki Kanemoto failed to play every inning of his team’s game for the first time since 1999, ending his “full inning” streak at 1492. Just think about that for a second. 1492 games without missing an inning, from age 31 to 42. Kanemoto did make a pinch hit appearance, so his consecutive game streak is alive.
• Roberto Petagine updates: Petagine will make his SoftBank debut during the interleague games in May at the earliest, and word is he’ll retire after his time in Fukuoka. Roberto’s 62 year-old wife Olga will be accompanying him to Japan.
• Randy Johnson threw out the first pitch at a Seibu game last week.
• One of my players to watch, Romash Tasuku Dass, made his first ichi-gun start of 2010 last week. The results? Not impressive. I didn’t see the game but he featured mostly a mid-80’s fastball, and got knocked out of the game early. Deanna was right.
• Casey Fossum also made his Japan debut last week, throwing six shutout innings in a Tigers win. His velocity wasn’t great either.
• SoftBank worked out Michael Olmsted and JD Durbin. Based on the Nikkan Sports write-up, Olmsted was the more impressive of the two, striking out six of nine batters faced. Durbin struck out four of 11. I’m not sure if these were live batters or in a simulated game scneario.

• NPB Bullet Points: The Season Thus Far: News and notes on the season so far
  …In Japanese:

  Juan Morillo has been d… http://bit.ly/b7YaDC #

• SoftBank Brings Petagine Back to Japan: Looking for another power hitter, the SoftBank Hawks have pulled former NP… http://bit.ly/b5KAYU #
• sports leagues unite against Skip Bayless: http://onion.com/crvggd #

Looking for another power hitter, the SoftBank Hawks have pulled former NPB star Roberto Petagine off the scrap heap, signing him to a $400k deal with performance bonuses. Petagine previously played for Yakult from 1999-2002, where he was an absolute terror, before Yomiuri signed him to replace Hideki Matsui’s bat. Since leaving Japan, Petagine has spent time with the Red Sox, Mariners and LG Twins of Korea.

Petagine joins a rather crowded 1B/3B/DH/LF depth chart. I figure whatever at-bats he gets will come at the expense of Lee Beom-Ho. Nobuhiro Matsuda seems to be getting most of the starts at third, relegating Lee to a bench role despite his superior OPS (.741 vs .691). Hiroki Kokubo (1B) and Jose Ortiz (LF) are off to good starts, and Nobuhiko Matsunaka is SoftBank’s DH, even though he’s not the hitter he once was.

Two other questions remain:

1. How much of his wife, who is about 30 years older, be seen at Fukuoka Dome? She was ever-present in Roberto’s Yakult days.
2. Will Tuffy Rhodes get another shot? (Rakuten? Nippon Ham?) Petagine is, of course, playing for a fraction of what Rhodes turned down from Orix.