NPB Tracker

It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve actually written about baseball. Let’s get up to speed with a few bullet points.

Japanese Stories:

• The Giants’ Yoshinobu Takahashi has yet to play this year, and when he finally does get into a game it will be at first base and not his usual rightfield.
• Marty Brown’s future in Hiroshima may be in jeopardy.
• Stephen Randolph would like to visit his birthplace, Okinawa, while in Japan. He’ll get that opportunity next spring if he can stick with the BayStars.
• Yasuhiro Ichiba is switching to a three-quarters delivery.
• Tuffy Rhodes will return to game action on August 4.

English Stories:

• Hiroshima Carp bust Scott Dohmann has signed a minor league contract with the Diamondbacks, and former Hanwha Eagle Victor Cruz has signed with Baltimore.
• Gwynar gives us an update on the troubled Kansai League.
• Is Bobby Valentine the most beloved manager of all time? Maybe.
• Christopher Pellegrini takes on Japan’s tendency to over-utilize the sacrifice bunt.
• Heath Bintliff of Dempsey’s Army pointed out to me that Ryohei Tanaka is performing well at 2A for the Orioles.

Junichi Tazawa is getting his first start at Fenway Park — though it might not be what you think. According to Sponichi, Tazawa will get the call for Pawtucket in Futures at Fenway, a 3A game the Red Sox hold annually at the MLB stadium. The game will be on August 8.

Tazawa was quoted as saying, “being able to pitch at Fenway Park will be a good experience. I’ll probably be nervous but I’m looking forward to it”.

“K” signs and boards are commonly seen at ballparks around the United States, but until now, uncommon in Japan. NPB fans will be able to see the same at Fukuoka Yahoo Dome starting this week. The board will be placed along the first base line and a “K” will  be added every time a SoftBank Hawks pitcher records a strikeout. Surprisingly this will be the first time an NPB team has permanently placed a “K” board.

A SoftBank spokesperson states, “Batters are able to receive an award (hitting an advertisement board/ceiling), so we decided the pitchers should be able to obtain something as well.” If a pitcher breaks the team record set on April 6th, 2008 by Shota Ohba recording 16 strikeouts in a game, the pitcher will receive 100-man yen ($10,000) worth of gift certificates.

In the first half, the SoftBank Hawks led the league with 657 total strikeouts. If strikeout shows by pitchers increase that should bring a positive for a team staying in the playoff spot and be a spice for some individuals. Ohba states, “100-man yen is pretty big. Of course I will go for it.”

If the prize acts as an incentive for high-strikeout performances, we can expect that to have an effect on a pitching staff aiming to keep its team in a playoff position.

Compared to the many moves and much rumbling near the MLB trade deadline, the deadline in NPB ended quietly. There was a total of one trade during the 2009 season which was Taiyo Fujita being traded from Hanshin to Seibu for Keisuke Mizuta, a minor move where both teams filled supporting roles.

The numbers after the trade…

• Taiyo Fujita (Seibu Lions) – 2.0 innings, ER, K (two games): 4.50ERA
• Keisuke Mizuta (Hanshin Tigers)- Strikeout in one-at-bat

As you can see from the numbers both players have made minimal impact with their new teams. Rather than teams looking to add the last piece for a championship run near the deadline in the MLB, it’s more of two teams allowing their player to join a team with more possibilities. More teams look to add a suketto as seven foreign players were added by teams since the 2009 season started. However they tend to give chances to players that have already experienced the NPB culture as they feel comfortable adding an experienced player during mid-season where time for adjustment is limited.

Some players added during in-season…

• Craig Brazell to the Hanshin Tigers (38 games: .302 (45-149), 8HR, 27RBI, 14R, 2BB, 39K)
• Jose Ortiz joing the Softbank Hawks (61 games: .298 (68-256), 14HR, 48RBI, 37R, 21BB, 40K)
• Hiroshima Notes: Dohmann Out, Phillips In? (23 games: .239 (21-96), 5HR, 13RBI, 6R, 6BB, 14K)
• NPB Notes: Mench, McClain (61 games: .243 (52-238), 10HR, 28RBI, 23R, 22B, 60K)
• Rakuten Introduces Linden, Re-introduces Fukumori (20 games: .313 (26-83), 5HR, 12RBI, 11R, 7BB, 31K)
• Foreign Player Additions: Randolph, Soriano (neither have not pitched yet)

The number of teams might limit the number of trades in the NPB (12 compared to MLB’s 30), but a culture of trading players are relatively new and there has been limited number of “blockbuster” trades in the league. The one that comes up to mind is a swap between Hayato Terahara for Hitoshi Tamura, a trade between a former first-round draft pick and a home run king.

The trade deadline is a big event for everybody involved in the MLB and headlines evolve daily with rumors and potential deals. It creates stories and news that people talk about around the water coolers and peoples’ interest  increases during the period of time. It should not be a bad thing for the NPB if people start engaging talks about the game and trades becoming more of a common business. However the difference in the culture of the games allows the transactions after the season starts to be limited and with only 12 teams and six of them facing each other about 20 times a season, it’s extremely difficult for teams deal players that might hurt them in the future.

Norichika Aoki is being moved from center to left field due to the poor defense of the team in the last two games. The Tokyo Yakult Swallows have the least errors in NPB, but committed three errors during their last two losses. Manager Takada states, “We have been pretty good defensively, but the defense miscues hurt. So do the misses which will not be recorded on paper.”

Manager Takada quotes regarding Aoki, “It’s not worth commenting. Not hitting the ball well could affect the defense. He usually does not emotionally commit himself to defense, but he needs to do his job. He is a player that is capable of doing it.”  After the game, the decision was made immediately to move Aoki to left from field.

This will be the first time Aoki will start a game in left during the season. In his rookie season, he came in to play the position twice and also played the position in seven of the nine games during the World Baseball Classic. An in-season conversion is rare and manager Takada says, “It might be a good thing for him mentally.”

The anger of the manager reached to a point where he changed the position of the team leader and we shall see if the manager pulling the trigger three games into the second half of the season will have a positive effect on the team. Aoki is hitting .308 (4-13) with HR, 3RBI and 2R in the first three games in the post All Star break. The Tokyo Yakult Swallows are currently in 3rd place trailing the league-leading Tokyo Yomiuri Giants by 4.5 games.

Couple of player acquisitions to pass on here…

• Yokohama has picked up perennial non-roster invitee Stephen Randolph. Yokohama has been looking to add pitching all year, and tried to get Ryan Sadowski back in June. Randolph, who was born in Okinawa, has a 5.52 era in 155 career MLB innings. He hasn’t been effective at AAA this year.
• Hiroshima has signed pitcher Dioni Soriano to an ikusei contract. Gwynar found out that Soriano had been playing in the Island League this year. I wasn’t able to dig up much beyond that, but I did find his page on a Facebook clone. We’ll see if Dioni turns out to be as good as the last Soriano the Carp had.

With the player acquisition deadline nearing (July 31 JST), we should see one or two other acquisitions.

Yu Darvish was examined after the all-star game and some worried of his status for the start of second half of the season, but he seems to be ready to go. He participated in the team practice at Marine Stadium and completed the full workout with the team. The team will keep evaluating his status, but he seems to be on schedule to start his second half versus the Softbank Hawks on July 31st.

Darvish talked with the head trainer before practice and the trainer stated, “He was able to play catch normally,”  so he gave him the okay to participate in full practice. The swelling is alleviating according to reports and he took the precaution of icing his shoulder after practice.

He will be evaluated again in his bullpen session two days prior to the start. His pitching coach, former major leaguer Masato Yoshii stated that he looks fine and there should be no problem.

According to multiple sources out of Japan, Junichi Tazawa has been promoted to Triple-A Pawtucket and will make his first appearance with the team on July 29. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him get a September MLB call-up.

You can read up on Tazawa’s time in Double-A here.

So Aroldis Chapman has defected from Cuba. With all the hype around Chapman during the WBC, I thought a defection was inevitable, but I didn’t see it happening this year. It will take Chapman a little time to apply for asylum and set up a domicile somewhere, but we should see a bidding war emerge over the next couple months.

Prior to the WBC, I would have said that if Chapman were to defect this year, his contract offers would have exceeded the four-year, $32m deal that Jose Contreras got from the Yankees back in 2002. But now that we’ve seen him look mortal against Japan’s WBC lineup of contact hitters, learned that Cuban League numbers aren’t that great, and found out that he might be five years older than previously believed, I have my doubts. Chapman’s first MLB contract will make him a richer man than I’ll ever be, but I think his first MLB deal will make him only about $20m richer than me.

For another dose of reality on Chapman, I turn to Cuban baseball expert Peter Bjarkman, who wrote bearish article about Chapman after he defected:

Chapman definitely has his negatives, foremost among them a demonstrated lack of strike-zone control, a one-pitch arsenal, and an inconsistent Cuban League performance over four National Series campaigns. Hurling for a Holguín club that made this year’s post-season and has been largely a middle-of-the-pack outfit during Chapman’s tenure, the southpaw flame thrower has won only slightly more than half his decisions (24-21), though he did enjoy his best season (11-4 and a league-best 130 Ks in 118 innings) this past winter. He has twice topped the 100 K mark but never approached Maels’s record-setting standards. Chapman is definitely more a raw “thrower” than a savvy “pitcher” and numerous questions surround his abilities to master the finer details of his craft.

One of the things that makes this situation unique is that it’s happening post Information Revolution. Thanks to the Internet and WBC, we, as consumers, have learned more about Chapman than perhaps any other hyped Cuban defector. Will that help his market value? There’s no way we can really know for sure. I think we’ll see that the Internet hype will have the biggest impact on the fans’ expectations of him.

I’ve occasionally wondered why Japanese clubs don’t make more of a play for top Cuban talent. In theory, NPB teams should be able to go after Cuban players without them having to defect. Katsuya Nomura joked about this during the WBC: “we probably can’t get him (Chapman). Would it be okay to ask Castro?”.

Joking aside, Nomura actually has brought Cuban players to Japan: national team stars Antonio Pacheco and Orestes Kindelan played for him in the early 00’s on the Shidax Industrial League team. During the same period, Omar Linares played for Chunichi at the NPB level. The difference, of course, is that Chapman is young and entering his prime, which Pacheco, Kindelan and Linares were all winding down their careers. But still, none of the three had to denounce their Cuban citizenship and all were able to return to Cuba after playing in Japan.

So maybe this means we’ll get to see Pedro Lazo or Yulieski Gourriel in Japan at some point. I hope so, because it doesn’t seem like either one will ever defect, and I’d love to see what they can do at a higher level of competition.

In a blog post, Bobby Valentine has officially put the last nail in the coffin of any hopes that he’d return next year:

And most importantly, I came to feel that for me to leave the team at the end of the 2009 season is best for the Shigemitsu family and for the Chiba Lotte Marines, and so I wanted to make this announcement about the decision as soon as possible.

[…]

Please view this announcement as my determination to make Chiba Lotte Marines baseball fun once again, for our fans and for each member of the team. I have always felt victory was shallow–and true victory was impossible–if the attempt to gain it was not fun. This year has not been fun for anyone who truly loves the Chiba Lotte Marines, so I will make a renewed effort to make this 2009 season the most fun that it can possibly be, and one that we will all remember and cherish for our lifetimes.

(read the whole post here)

Why make this announcement now, given that the team has already announced that they aren’t bringing him back? I suppose this is a way for Bobby to make a statement on his own terms. It’s also a message that the fan-lead, grassroots efforts to convince Lotte management to bring him back probably aren’t going to work, and that he just wants to focus on baseball for the rest of the year.