NPB Tracker

The Red Sox have four Japanese pitchers on their 40-man roster, and as such are getting their share of coverage in the Japanese media. 

• Daisuke Matsuzaka has been training in advance of the WBC with his former team, the newly re-uniformed Saitama Seibu Lions. See if you can spot him in this YouTube footage. The catching drill around 5:55 is worth watching too.
• Perhaps taking a cue from Ichiro, Matsuzaka also found his way to the batting cage. Matsuzaka took 28 swings off Seibu ace Hideaki Wakui, hitting 13 over the fence. A passing John Wasdin commented, “it’s Japan’s Big Papi”, probably with a tone of sarcasm that didn’t make the trip from English to Japanese and back. Matsuzaka did make at least one pinch-hitting appearance in his Seibu days.
• Junichi Tazawa is getting a quick start on his Boston career. He’s been in camp for a couple days and is working out with Takashi Saito. Sanspo has pics of his first Red Sox bullpen session: 1, 2. He threw 62 pitches.
• Tazawa followed that up with a 54-pitch session on the 14th.
• Takashi Saito celebrated his 39th birthday with a 4km run.
• And I’ll close with an English-language article, an Alex Speier piece reflecting on Hideo Nomo, with comments from Tazawa and Saito.

Man, it is pouring here in Silicon Valley on this President’s Day weekend. Great time to do a little bloggin’

The Japanese sports rags have been publishing pics of NPB camps for a couple of weeks, but now that MLB & WBC camps are opening we’ll get coverage of those as well:

• Japan’s WBC camp has opened in Miyazaki, southern Japan. Several thousand fans were on hand to see Ichiro et al work out at Sun Marine Stadium. Here’s a pic of Ichiro and Daisuke Matsuzaka, with Yu Darvish in the background.
• Kenshin Kawakami signs his first few MLB autographs.
• Koji Uehara gets a slap on the back from O’s manager Dave Trembley.
• Kei Igawa is pitching for a job, or for a trade.

• The first practice game of the spring training season, Hanshin vs Nippon Ham. Yu Darvish started for the Fighters, while Kyuji Fujikawa pitched the first few innings for the Tigers. Note that Kyuji surrenders a walk to Jason Botts after being called for stalling on his third pitch. I’m no fan of that rule, but Kyuji should be the last guy breaking it as he only throws two pitches.
• New Chunichi Dragons import Tony Blanco has been getting good reviews in the Japanese media, but I could see him having a great camp and then not doing much during the season. Here’s a fan-shot video of him taking batting practice.
• Here’s another fan-shot Dragons video, this one of Maximo Nelson pitching in an intrasquad game. Very high video quality on this one.

You can find more using this YouTube search link.

NPB camp invitees Luis Jimenez and Levi Romero have signed contracts with their respective teams. Jimenez gets a deal with Nippon Ham, where he figures to be depth behind Jason Botts and Termel Sledge. Romero will take an instructional contract with the Yomiuri Giants paying him about $37k. He’ll wear number 111.

That was easier than I expected — I only had to look as far as my rss reader, where what I was looking for on the excellent Marine Blue blog. The author published a retrospective on Tanaka after he was released by the Marines, which includes abbreviated stats and a number of photos. Highly recommended. The author published similar retrospectives on all the players that left the Marines over the last offseason. 

Here are the stats, re-purposed in English.

Note that numbers prefixed with “E” in the appearances column are Eastern (minor) League appearances. I’ve italicized his 2003, top-level appearances. You can learn a lot more about the Japanese minor leagues on Deanna’s site.

Generally speaking I don’t take minor league stats too seriously. There are too many things to discredit them — the player might be working on a curveball, might be facing guys on rehab assignments, might be playing in front of an inexperienced defense. But from a young pitcher with eight years experience, I’d like to see some signs of improvement and a decent K rate, both of which are missing from Tanaka’s resume. Maybe he’ll take to US coaching and conditioning and improve, but the numbers would seem to indicate that he has a long way to go.

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.

In addition to a changeup and spike curve, Nikkan Sports is reporting that Koji Uehara is working on fastballs of the two-seam and cut variety. I thought Uehara already had a cutter, but I could be wrong. According to Nikkan Sports, he’s going to try out all these new pitches in spring training exhibition games. 

Sanspo adds that Uehara arrived in the camp on the 12th and hit the field almost immediately, making over 150 throws in long-toss and mound-distance excercises. Sanspo notes taht pitchers who work quickly tend to do well in the majors (I like that trait myself), and that should suit Uehara, who threw a 1hr 59min complete game in 1999.

I’m optimistic about Uehara. To be realistic, he’ll have to learn a new league, prove he’s healthy enough to start every fifth day, and get used to not getting the borderline calls he was given with Yomiuri. But it looks like he’s making adjustments, he’s a smart pitcher and he’s clearly thrilled to be in the Majors. I’m looking forward to watching him this year.

When talking about sports business in Japanese Professional Baseball, you’d have to say that one of the most aggressive teams is the Rakuten Golden Eagles, an expansion team that joined Nippon Professional Baseball in the 2005 season. One of two teams (the other being the Softbank Hawks) owned by a new generation information technology company, the team has been showing an aggressive approach to changing the color of business in professional baseball.

Their ballpark, Kleenex Stadium Miyagi, is a major league-style ballpark, being the first ballpark in Japan introducing the field level seats. The seating in the stadium has changed with renovation and has expanded recently with group seating near the right field section for family customers. Another major league-style section is the “Eagles’ Nest”, an indoor lounge above the first base side which gives the fans another option. This area can be used for events and parties on non-game days as well. The stadium also offers a day-care center for the fan’s children. On weekends and holidays, the parents will be able to leave their kids from the time the gate opens until thirty minutes after the final out. The stadium also provides an entertainment center called “Children’s Land.” During games this area will be open with entertainment attractions, such as a dome shaped trampoline, an air shute, and a train ride attraction for not only kids, but their parents as well.

Selling stadium naming rights is not common in Japan yet, and Stadium Miyagi is one of the few ballparks that have taken that opportunity to expand their business. Another sponsorship business they have been able to expand is on their LED scoreboard. New spaces on the scoreboard have allowed the opportunities to add sponsors and expand their business in another way.

Another interesting entertainment that the Rakuten Golden Eagles provides is their own cheerleading squad, known as the “Tohoku Golden Angels.” This will be the fifth year and the cheerleading team has reached to a partnership with United Spirit Association/Japan which has its headquarters in the United States. They look at this new partnership to not only benefit the baseball and sports world, but an opportunity to learn from cheerleading in the United States and find ways to provide optimism to northern Japan.

Optimism will be helpful in an economic downturn and the Golden Eagles are preparing to be creative with their ticket sales strategies as the future becomes less predictable. This is a strategy that American fans are familiar with, but the Golden Eagles will be the first to implement in Japanese professional baseball. Every season game will be categorized into one of the five set prices for tickets regarding the time of the year, day of the week, and opponents. With flex pricing in place, the average price per ticket will be lower than the previous season.

As economic crisis hits the world, this may not be a bad time for the individual teams in Japanese professional baseball to expand their business by being creative and implementing the “Sport Management” way of thinking. Being too dependent on the owner’s business could only hurt in a time like this… It will be interesting to see what the other teams are coming up with and I will touch on another team’s new business idea next.

Coming: Dan Johnson, Les Walrond, Ryan Glynn, Tom Mastny, Toshihiro Noguchi, Kosuke Kato

Going: Ryoji Aikawa, JJ Furmaniak, Matt White, Dave Williams, Larry Bigbie, Mike Wood, Travis Hughes, Takuro Ishii, Takahiro Saeki (retirement)

Staying: Daisuke Miura

Trending: unknown

Synopsis: Held on to their most valuable free agent in Miura, swapped out an ineffective group of foreigners for a mostly unproven group. On paper, the additions of Glynn, Johnson and Mastny look good. Noguchi is somewhat of a step down from Aikawa. Overall, it doesn’t look like the ‘Stars made any acquisitions that will get them out of the cellar in ’09.

…while it lasted.

Jack Zduriencik and Don Wakamatsu can breathe a sigh of relief. Ichiro’s flirtation with the mound is over. Word got back around to Seattle’s brass and coincidentally, Ichiro announced that he’s stopping. I’m sure the Mariners would have found out about this anyway, but I’d like to think that NPB Tracker played a role in this development.

Anyway, after his mound session on the 7th, Ichiro took three days off. Ichiro is training on his own so we don’t know if he would have taken those days off anyway, but when he returned, he commented to Sanspo: “my upper-right body is still. I’m quitting (pitching) (big laughter)”. Nikkan Sports had a similiar quote: “my shoulder is stiff and won’t move. Getting caught up with pitching got me into a little trouble”*. And with that, Ichiro returned to hitting and fielding drills in the wonderful Green Stadium Kobe Skymark Stadium.

I think Ichiro proved a point — he has enough baseball talent to do something like this with credibility. Most of the commentary I saw on this was positive, aside from the Mariners fans who were reasonably worried he’d get hurt. It’s tempting to think we could see Ichiro play in the field and then come into pitch — it’s too bad he doesn’t throwlefthanded, so we could see him play in the field, pitch to a batter, and then go back. Maybe it’s better for this to be part of the Ichiro folklore, but I’ll go on the record and say I would like to see him pitch in a real game.

Before I go, let me be pedantic and clear up a couple of mistranslations I’ve seen around the web on this story:

• Ichiro didn’t throw 21 curveballs, he threw his first breaking pitch on his 21st throw
• There was never any mention of Ichiro throwing a curveball, only forkballs
• Ichiro isn’t training with Team Japan. He’s training on his own at Kobe’s Skymark stadium, and he has a couple former players working out with him
• As far as I know, Tatsunori Hara didn’t ask Ichiro to warm up as a pitcher. From what I’ve seen he simply said he’d have to use a fielder in an emergency situation given pitch count and tiebreaker rules, and Ichiro took to the mound on his own. If someone else knows differently, let me know.

*The phrases Ichiro used are a little ambigious to a non-native Japanese speaker like myself. Here’s the original Japanese: 「肩がパンパンになって動けなくなった。調子こいてピッチングしたらエライことになった」