NPB Tracker

Little known fact: other than baseball the sport I follow most closely is ice hockey. And although my current home team, the San Jose Sharks, choked miserably in the playoffs again, my original hometown team, the Chicago Blackhawks, has qualified for the Western Conference Finals. So now is a great time to remind my fellow hockey fans that the Blackhawks have one of the best team songs in all of sports — Here Come the Hawks. You can get the mp3 of the regular version here and the instrumental here.

Here’s what the Yankees saw when they watched Yu Darvish last week.

Note that this velocity chart is in a groovy new javascript format. I’m hoping to add some interactivity to it over the next couple of weeks. This one is kind of the proof of concept, once I see that things are working I’ll jump back on to my schedule. I’ve looked at this chart in Firefox and Chrome, but not much in IE, so if anyone sees any issues please let me know.

Update: hover over each object on the chart and enjoy the effects.

This is a call for expertise from NPB Tracker readers. I’m interested in learning more about the following two topics:

• the current state of baseball in Brazil
• the Netherlands’ Honkbal Hoofdklasse league

I don’t know of any English-language resources, except for the excellent mister-baseball.com for the latter topic. If any readers out there know about these topics and wouldn’t mind sharing your knowledge with the site, please leave a comment or shoot me an email at npbtracker@gmail.com.

Sports Hochi ran a piece the other day saying that the Yankees had three scouts watching Yu Darvish make his shortest start of the season, a seven-inning performance in Nippon Ham’s 10-1 win over Orix. Darvish didn’t have his best stuff, topping out at about 91mph, but still held the Buffaloes to one run on four hits.

Obligatory repeating of myself: Darvish is five years away from free agency and has repeatedly denied any interest in moving to MLB. I find it interesting that that doesn’t stop the scouts from watching him though. The Yankees sent Gene Michael to Japan last year to check him out, so they’re obviously interested in acquiring him down the road. Maybe this persistance will pay off.

Let’s take a look at how actively teams are spending on foreign players. Each NPB team is allowed to only have four foreign players on its 25-man roster, but there is no organizational limit on foreign players. Many teams choose to hold more, and allow them to compete for a roster spots. As you can see in the rankings, many teams are unable to maxmimize the foreign player slots on their 25-man roster.

Out of 39 foreign players on NPB 25-man rosters, 13 have previous experience in Japan with a different team. In-season additions like Jose Ortiz for the Softbank Hawks and Scott McClain by the Hiroshima Toyo Carp are two recent examples of this,  showing how teams are more likely to take a risk on a player that knows Japanese baseball rather than looking for new talent overseas.

 

 * NPB rosters as of May 6, 2009

I’ve come across several news sources saying that former Chiba Lotte Marine Ryohei Tanaka has signed a minor league deal with the Orioles. I find this strange as the news was widely reported during the offseason. I guess it’s official now.

The only one that offers any new information is this Mainichi report that says that Tanaka will spend May at the Orioles’ extended spring training facility in Sarasota, and then join 1A Aberdeen in June.

Ken Takahashi put up a good line in his MLB debut:

Mets fans — how’d he look?

My profile on Takahashi can be found here.

This is pretty good — Tom Hanks is going to throw the first pitch at Yomiuri-Chunichi game on May 8th at the Tokyo Dome. Hanks commented, “I’ve loved baseball since I was a kid. I’m really looking forward to meeting the WBC winning manager, Tatsunori Hara. I’m going to try to throw a strike right down the middle” (translation of a translation). Hanks will be in town to promote the Japan release of Angels and Demons.

If the stars align you’ll be able to check out the game right here on NPB Tracker.