NPB Tracker

The words “Sport Management” and “Sports Business” have recently become trendy in Japan. Some universities jumped at the opportunity to expand interest from students to the community, while other universities have quietly been observing what opportunities sports business may bring. The idea of sports being able to make money and individual teams being able to operate independently was fart-fetched due to the long history of professional teams being dependent on parent companies, which is still the fact today in most cases.

One of the universities jumping at the opportunity is Waseda University, to which Masumi Kuwata has recently been accepted. Their school philosophy from founder Shigenobu Okuma was to be involved in athletics as much as academics. Even though their implementation of sports activities in the classroom has run since 1964, their history of the Sport Management and business courses has started recently in 2003, which illustrates how short the history of sports business has been in the mind of the academia. Now many of the universities that have been observers are jumping at the possibility and developing a new area in sports studies at a significant pace.

As more individuals have looked overseas to play professional sports, more of the Japanese population has shown an interest in the sports world overseas. Along with the creation of professional soccer and basketball leagues in the last twenty years, people have started to recognize that sports, indeed have an opportunity to bring in revenue. That is the same for Japanese professional baseball and teams has started to expand their strategies by learning from other professional teams and started to bring some creativity to their strategies. With the economy being unstable, the importance of professional teams not being dependent on their parent companies might be crucial in the future. As more and more individuals start to develop sport management knowledge on Japanese campuses, the new generation might be able to bring a CHANGE to the sports business in the future. I will look into some of the new sports business ideas implemented in team management throughout Japanese professional baseball in my next entry.

Coming: Tadahito Iguchi, Gary Burnham, Chase Lambin, Juan Muniz

Going: Julio Zuleta, Jose Ortiz, Winston Abreu, Szu-Yu Wu

Staying: Brian Sikorski, Benny Agbayani, Saburo Ohmura, Naoyuki Shimizu, Shingo Ono, Tasuku Hashimoto

Trending: upward

Synopsis: Iguchi is an upgrade over Ortiz, and the combination of Lambin/Burnham should be more productive than the injury-prone Julio Zuleta. None of Lotte’s major Japanese free agency-eligible players chose to sign elsewhere for Bobby Valentine’s final season.

Admit it Cubs fans – you liked Kosuke Fukudome at first. He came roaring out of the gates, and the Northside faithful united in celebration of their new import star with hachimakis and t-shirts featuring the Asahi flag and “Fukudome” written in katakana. The hype was so great that Sports Illustrated even deemed him worthy of  cover appearance, thus assuring both he and the Cubs would suffer from the associated jinx (which one prescient Cubs fan tried unsuccessfully to prevent).

Then, Fuku went into a slump in the early summer, the novelty wore off and the honeymoon period was over. As the summer progressed, so did Fukudome’s struggles, drawing the ire of the Cubs fans and getting scapegoated after the Cubs’ latest postseason choke job. Fukudome wasn’t the only one responsible for the Cubs tanking in the playoffs, but to be fair, he did vastly underperform the expectations that came with his contract. 

Why was he so bad in the second half? You could probably point to a number of reasons — better scouting on him for the rest of the league, inadequate translation services, difficulty adjusting to the more demanding travel and game schedule, late affects of his 2007 elbow surgery, or some of each. I would put travel forward as a concern; Fuku had an .825 ops at Wrigley despite the late-season booing, versus a .655 ops on the road. Lou Pinella may want to rest him a bit on roadtrips in the upcoming season.

For his part, Fukudome has spent quite a bit of his offseason training with his Chunichi Dragons coaches in Japan. Nikkan Sports quoted him as saying, “I have some things that don’t fit with the way of doing things over there [America]”. He’s currently training with his 2002 batting coach, Kyosuke Sasaki and took 300 swings in the batting cage the other day. Clearly there are adjustments for him to make, and Fukudome must be hoping that Sasaki can help him regain some of his 2002 form, when he robbed Matsui of the Central League Triple Crown by winning the batting title.

I get WGN here in the Bay Area, and I got to see the Cubs a couple of times while he was slumping last season. I noticed two things about Fukudome that appeared to be problematic: 1) gotta shorten up that swing 2) pitchers were backing him off the plate by throwing hard inside; he needs to stand his ground. The one encouraging thing was that in the few games I watched, he wasn’t chasing bad pitches. 

It’s been speculated that the additions of So Taguchi and Ken Kadokura on minor league were partially motivated by the struggles of Fukudome. Honestly, it’s hard not to draw that conclusion, but I think it’s unlikely that either one will have a material impact on Fukudome’s performance. Taguchi seems like the more likely of the two to help — he’s been in America for seven seasons and has gone from being a guy that couldn’t make a big league roster to being a useful role outfielder. The problem is that he’s behind Reed Johnson and Joey Gathright on the depth chart, and both of those guys are younger and were more productive in 2008 than Taguchi. I like the Kadokura acquisition as a low-risk baseball move. I think we’ll see him in the majors for the Cubs at some point this year but he’ll be adjusting to MLB life himself.

So it’s a do or die year for Fukudome. I could see him hitting .298 with 45 doubles, but I could also see him having another sub-par year.

Coming: Nelson Payano, Tony Blanco, Junichi Kawahara

Going: Kenshin Kawakami, Norihiro Nakamura, Tyrone Woods, Rafael Cruz, Ryosuke Morioka

Staying: Hitoki Iwase, Byung-Gyu Lee, Maximo Nelson, Wei-Yin Chen, Tomas de la Rosa

Trending: downward

Synopsis: Chunichi lost three major contributors from it’s 2008 team, and so far hasn’t replaced any of them with a veteran signing. They still have a deep team, but will play 2009 without a veteran ace or middle-lineup slugger. Chunichi’s foreign additions for 2009 are of the discount bin variety, rather than established performers.

While I was digging up video clips for my recent profile of Norichika Aoki, I found a couple of Ichiro highlights that I thought were worth posting. Ichiro’s style of hitting is known as furiko dahoh in Japan, which roughly translates to “pendulum hitting technique”, named for the way he leans back and then lunges forward through his swing. Ichiro shortened up his stride and cut down on the movement his swing after moving to Seattle, so he’s much less pendulum-atic now.

These home runs show the evolution on Ichiro’s swing while he was still in Japan:

• 1995 Japan Series, game 5: note the slightly open stance and the lengthy stride.
• 1996 Japan Series, game 1: much more open stance, big kick-ish stride.
• Two homer-game, 1997: big, exagerrated kick-stride. You can see how he transfers his power to his front foot in this clip.
• 100th career home run, off Daisuke Matsuzaka in 1999: kick less pronounced.
• And a lengthy collection of Ichiro’s Japan-era home runs, starting with the 1992 Junior All-Star Game and ending with the 200 All-Star Game.

Ichiro has changed his approach quite a bit since moving to MLB — he’s shortened his stride, cut down on his movement, and become more of a back leg hitter focusing on making contact and taking advantage of his speed. In Japan, he used his lower body to generate a lot more power and was able to turn on weak breaking pitches. He wasn’t renowned for his power in Japan, but was always good for a .500+ slg pct.

Coming: Ryan Wing, Tomohiro Nioka, Masanori Hayashi, Luis Jimenez (in camp but not signed)

Going: Michael Nakamura, Takahito Kudoh, Ryan Glynn

Staying: Jason Botts, Termel Sledge, Brian Sweeney, Atsunori Inaba

Trending: a bit to the negative side

Synopsis: I think I’d rather have Nakamura than Nioka, but if Nioka bounces back and Hayashi gives the Fighters 75% of what they had with Nakamura, it will be a net gain. Those are two big “ifs” though. Yu Darvish remains the key to this though; as he goes so will the Fighters. Sho Nakata waiting in the wings doesn’t hurt either.

Coming: Kevin Mench, manager Akinobu Mayumi

Going: Lew Ford, Ryan Vogelsong, Toshihiro Noguchi

Staying: Jeff Williams, Aarom Baldiris, Scott Achison, Chris Resop

Trending: about the same

Synopsis: Mench should be better than Ford, but aside from that Hanshin will go into 2009 with the same team that squandered a big lead down the stretch last season. The Tigers failed to land their offseason prize in Daisuke Miura, and in their nominal efforts to sign Kenshin Kawakami, so they still lack a guy who can eat 200+ innings. Resop could be an assett if he gets over his control issues.

My next radio appearance will be tomorrow morning (Feb 4) at 8:00am PST with Baseball Digest Live. Tune in if you can!

Just before the start of the 2003 season, I remember seeing a news piece on Kazumi Saito. Saito was going into his seventh professional season, and despite having a career mark of just 9-4, he had been selected as the then Fukuoka Daiei Hawks’ opening day starter. The piece was about how it was time for him to step up and live to his potential, but  I was skeptical. I liked Hayato Terahara better and thought that starting Saito on opening day was a bad sign for the Hawks. I was way off on that one; Saito went 20-3 on the season and shared the Sawamura Award with Kei Igawa, as the Hawks cruised to their first Pacific League title since 2000.

Since his breakout season in ’03, Saito has been dominant when healthy but otherwise a non-factor. In his three healthiest years (’03, ’05, ’06), his cumulative record is 54-9(!); the rest of the time it’s a more pedestrian 25-14. The difference in his other stats is apparent on his page at JapaneseBaseball.com.

Injury History
Before we go any further, we need to take a look at Saito’s Priorian injury history, courtesy of Wikipedia. 

1997: “Loose shoulder”. Briefly converted to a hitter, appearing in a few games as an outfielder.
1998: Shoulder surgery.
2001: Unspecified shoulder issue.
2004:  Missed time due to “not being able to get into shape”, hit hard when he was in.
2005: Missed his opening day start due to shoulder pain, rebounded to have a great season.
2006: Sat out of the US-Japan All-Star Series with shoulder inflammation.
2007: Missed time with muscle fatigue in his shoulder. 
2008: Surgery in January to repair his rotator cuff from years of hard work. Spent much of the season rehabbing in Arizona.

Like Mark Prior, Saito has a messed-up shoulder. Unlike Prior, who was healthy in college and for his first few pro seasons, Saito been bothered by injuries from a younger age. Saito has been more present in the media over the last year or so, giving me the impression that he has at least a shot at coming back at some point, whereas Prior seems to be a bigger question mark at this point.

I don’t have special insight into whether overuse or mechanics are the root cause of Saito’s injury trouble, but I will say we’ve seen a number of NPB pitchers enjoy relatively short peaks due to overuse. Unfortunately, NPB pitch count statistics are not easy to find.

Stuff & Mechanics
Saito’s stuff begins with a fastball that, if you believe the TV gun, reaches about 94mph. His best breaking pitch is a fork/splitter that breaks straight downward, and he also mixes in a curveball and a slider.  (cue the YouTube footage) One of the better clips I found was this one of a young Saito pitching mop up in the 2000 Japan Series, striking out Hideki Matsui and Domingo Martinez. This longer video shows Saito getting swinging strikeouts with his fastball, splitter and curve.

I’m no expert on pitching mechanics, so I’ll share these two videos and see what the audience thinks. This first one is live game footage taken by a fan at a game at Chiba Marine Stadium. The second is slow motion footage of a number of pitchers, and Saito appears from 0:18-0:40. To me it looks like he doesn’t extend his throwing arm much and kind of snaps it through his motion. Of course, we don’t know what kind of changes he’ll come back with following last year’s surgery.

In Conclusion
Even 100 decent innings from Saito in 2009 would go a long way towards restoring the Hawks’ competitiveness. But whether or not he’ll be able to compete for a full season or perform at his previous level remains to be seen. Saito just turned 31, so he has some good years left, but there is a lot of wear and tear on that right shoulder.

I occasionally get asked if we’ll ever see Saito in the majors. My answer is that I kind of doubt it. Saito is 3-4 healthy years away from free agency, and the Hawks will never post him. I never say never, and he did enjoy his time in Arizona, so if he can stay healthy and has the will… maybe. But it seems like a longshot, and given that Saito’s injury history means we won’t see him in extracurriculars like WBC and US-Japan Series’, this is a guy that Stateside fans will have to enjoy via justin.tv.

The next profiles on this site will be for WBC players, so don’t touch that dial…

Coming: Ryan Vogelsong, Jon Leicester, Jose Fernandez, Naoyuki Ohmura, Fumikazu Takanami, Kento Kanazawa

Going: Tom Davey, Ramon Ortiz, John Koronka, Eric Jung, Arihito Muramatsu, Kazuhiro Kiyohara (retirement)

Staying: Tuffy Rhodes, Alex Cabrera, Greg LaRocca

Trending: marginally upward

Synopsis: Orix added two foreign players with NPB experience in Vogelsong and Fernandez, and got the better of the Ohmura – Muramatsu trade with SoftBank. On the downside, they didn’t add anyone significant to the pitching staff. Word is they’re not done adding to their foreign roster.