NPB Tracker

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed the Hanshin Tigers this year, but team has already decided not to bring Kevin Mench back next season. Team president Nobuo Minami was quoted in Sports Hochi as saying “he won’t be here next year”. Mench has had a challenging stay in Japan, reportedly dealing with fatique and anxiety issues and ultimately getting just 15 games to prove himself with the Tigers, in which he hit .148.

Sanspo has additional reporting saying that Mench is due to head back to the States in the next few days for the birth of his twins in August (note: Kevin, if you’re reading this, congratulations from NPB Tracker). The article has an unnamed member of the Hanshin front-office saying “if he says ‘I don’t want to come back to Japan’, we won’t bring him back by force”. So there you have it.

With the Tigers sitting in 5th place and this looking like a lost season, the team is preparing for next year. Hanshin has mobilized scout Andy Sheets to begin building a list of acquisition targets, and they’re sending him and an international team representive to New York with the dual purpose of watching Hideki Matsui and checking out the new Yankee Stadium.

I never posted on this when it happened, but around the time that Hiroshima added Andy Phillips and subtracted Scott Dohmann, there were rumblings that the Carp were going after another pitcher.

Baseball sources indicated to me today that the Carp had a deal with Seattle AAA pitcher Randy Messenger, but couldn’t work out a financial arrangement with the Mariners.

The Carp are gunning for a playoff spot, so we’ll watch this space.

Nikkan Sports has a report saying that the Seibu Lions are aiming to acquire Toronto Blue Jays AAA righty Jonah Bayliss. According to the report, Seibu has a team representative in the US making progress with negotiations. Bayliss, 28, has an ugly 6.75 era in 64 MLB innings, but has also 54 MLB strikeouts. In 200.2 career AAA innings, he’s racked up 186 k’s to go with 87 walks and a 4.00 era.

The Lions have been looking for bullpen help ever since Alex Graman went down with an arm injury, and has already picked righty Taiyo Fujita from Hanshin.

This post comes at the request of Matt, but I’ve been a fan of Hayato Terahara since he represented Japan as a high schooler and Tommy Lasorda tried to recruit him to the Dodgers before the old Fukuoka Daiei Hawks drafted him. Note that Terahara has been on my to-do list since I started the site.

I’ve chosen Terahara’s recent complete game victory over Hiroshima to chart out.

Read on to check it out…

The post I wrote yesterday on the discarding the MLB draft certainly generated some lively debate. I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to comment. I’m also happy to see that this topic spawned interesting conversation on other sites, particularly Orioles Hangout.

To summarize what I wrote yesterday, the problems that I observed and would like to see addressed were:

• the inequity between players born in the US and outside the US
• the fact that the draft system can still be gamed by teams, players, and agents
• the potential for domestic leagues in other countries (Japan in particular) to get into bickering matches with MLB over territorial rights to players

I realize that this is in some ways an oversimplification, but my biggest point is that the current MLB draft is an outdated system that fails to account for the diversity we have in baseball today. My proposal was to eliminate the draft entirely, and replace it with a regulated free agent market, in which teams would have specific parameters on spending and number of players acquired. Some readers seemed to like the idea, others had different suggestions. Here are a few:

• force all players wishing to enter MLB through a draft
• move to a free agent system with strict bonus slots (nod to Crawdad @ Orioles Hangout)
• change the ages at which players are allowed to sign with MLB organizations
• keep the draft, but enforce caps on bonuses
• leave it alone

I’ll end this one with a question: what would you do to improve the MLB player entry system?

You might remember Kazuhito Tadano from his time in the Cleveland and Oakland organizations, including a season at the MLB level with the Indians in 2004.

Well, Tadano is in his second season back in Japan, and while he’s been inconsistent, he did come within one out of a no-hitter on July 10. Read on…

Nippon Ham’s Konkatsu Seat event resulted in a big hit mentioned in a previous post, and will continue to be an opportunity for fans to meet their future wives or husbands at the ballpark. The next event will be scheduled for the series against the Saitama Seibu Lions, September 21 to 23rd.

People probably had differing opinions regarding the event at first, but the results are in and is producing couples and most importantly, a new target audience  for Nippon Ham to sell tickets to. It will be interesting if other teams buy into this type of opportunity and expand their product beyond baseball even more.

Stumbled across this on Sponichi in Japanese, then found it in English on the Japan Times site — the Indians have released Masahide Kobayashi at is request. The Japan Times has a translated comment from Kobayashi: “Nothing is decided at the moment and I am having my agent look for a team for me (in the United States). In the meantime I will just keep myself ready to pitch.”

Kobayashi was better in the minors than with Cleveland, but still uninspiring. I always take AAA numbers with a grain of salt though, as he could have been working on a changeup or something. Walking away from a contract is a gutsy move, though assuming he’s healthy I think someone will take a flyer on him.

This is mostly about the MLB draft,  but applies to the NPB draft to some extent as well.

Consider the following events:

• In 2001, the Minnesota Twins draft the relatively unknown Joe Mauer over Mark Prior, 2001’s Stephen Strasburg, for a combination of baseball and signability reasons. This turned out to the be right choice.
• 2005, Luke Hochevar refuses to sign with the LA Dodgers after a series of blunders. The following year, Hochevar is drafted first overall by the Royals. This too is seen as a signability move.
• In 2006, the Chicago Cubs sign Jeff Samardzjia for first-round money despite having drafted him in the fifth round.
• In July 2008, the Oakland A’s signed Michel Ynoa to a $4m+ deal, which would have put him in the top ten largest bonuses had he been drafted. The A’s gave their first round draft pick, Jemile Weeks, a $1.9m bonus.
• In November 2008, Junichi Tazawa avoids his country’s draft and signs with the Boston Red Sox for $3m. The most he could have gotten from the NPB draft would have been a $1m bonus and $150k salary. In retaliation,  NPB brass installs an exile rule. In theory American-born players could take the opposite route.
• in July 2009, the Twins shell out $800k to sign 16 year-old German prospect Max Kepler.
  
• Aside from those specific examples, there are obviously hundreds of international prospects who have signed with the MLB team of their choice, and a rather smaller number of international free agents who have signed with teams in Japan. Meanwhile, amateur players who are educated in the US or Japan are bound to the draft entry rules of their respective domestic leagues.

The MLB draft was established in the sixties with the intent of more evenly distributing the available amateur talent among the MLB teams. I think it basically works, though it’s been proven that teams, players, and agents can game it a bit when they want to. It’s also important to remember that the draft was established in a time when there was far less international talent in major league baseball than there is today. Nearly 30% of the players at the MLB level were born outside the US, and nearly half of minor leaguers were as well. This year we’ve seen a lot more hype around the international signing period as well. It doesn’t quite match the draft but it’s gaining ground, and the signings of Tazawa and Kepler indicate a diversification of the talent pool.

So we have a system that’s moderately regulated for domestic players, and completely unregulated for international players. Should national players not have the same rights to choose their employers as international players?

What I’d propose is a regulated amateur free agent system, in which the draft is discarded entirely. Every amateur player who meets the entry criteria (age, education, whatever) would be allowed to negotiate and sign with any team, regardless of national origin. The single regulation I’d put in place would be a spending cap and a spending floor, based on league revenues. This would be to keep the Yankees from outspending everyone, and the Marlins from going cheap. There could also be a maximum and minimum number of players signed, to keep teams from giving their entire budget to one player. Beyond that, teams would be free to compete with each other on the basis being well-run operations. Essentially, the system would give the players the freedom to choose where they work and the teams the freedom to allocate their budgets as they see fit, while taking money out of the equation to a certain extent.

Thoughts?

The Seibu Lions have started a channel partnership with YouTube, the Lions@YouTube.  The service is provided for fans to view clips which are produced by the Seibu Lions. Many branded YouTube channels exist, including NBA.Com partnering with Youtube, but this is the first professional baseball team to have a channel on Youtube.

On the site, fans will be able to take a look at promotional events conducted by the Lions. What is interesting about the Lions@YouTube is that the website is not about highlight reels and game reviews, but more of a way for the fans to see behind-the-scenes and events conducted by the Lions.

In order to get a better idea, I recommend taking a look at these scenes from promotions done by the Lions:

• Businessman Night – An opportunity for businessman off from work to live out their childhood dreams. Some of the opportunities include interacting with former players after the game by taking ground balls and challenging to throw runners out from the outfield, and playing catch on the field immediately after the game.

• Baseball Women Night – An opportunity for female fans to interact with players and the sport. Opportunities include throwing off the mound and participate in toss batting, playing catch in the outfield and opportunities for couples to participate are available as well.

These events are conducted immediately after the game and it’s easy to see the excitement on participants’ faces in the clips. Establishing their own website in partnership with YouTube may inspire fans at home to attend the ball games themselves with their colleagues and friends.

Technology has been a big part of professional teams changing their methods of interacting with fans and the media, ie Twitter becoming the new trend in the United States. It will be interesting to see how NPB teams react to new trends and if other teams will follow with their own YouTube site or attempt for a new opportunity using a new wave of technology.