NPB Tracker

Hey, let’s break some news again. It’s been a while.

Former Yankee Masahiro Tanaka has declined to file for free agency, and will remain with the Rakuten Eagles for next season. Tanaka had been under a two-year contract that ended after the 2022 season.

Quoted in Nikkan Sports, Tanaka commented “I’ve decided not to exercise my right to free agency, and remain with the Eagles next season. I feel that next season, I want to apply my whole strength and energy toward arriving as League Champion, and Japan Champion.”

There had been some speculation that Tanaka might take another swing at MLB, but it feels like that ship has sailed. Nikkan Sports also adds the detail that Tanaka and Rakuten had been talking about a contract for next year since the middle of the season.

Nine years ago, in June 2008, I started this blog with a post about long-time Yakult Swallows closer Shingo Takatsu. Un-relatedly, I found out a few weeks later that I had my first child on the way, a son who would be born the following spring. Six years later, in 2014, I took my son to see his first Japanese baseball game, a Swallows home game at Tokyo’s Jingu Stadium. The visiting team was my favorite, the Hanshin Tigers, and my intent had been to begin indoctrinating him into Hanshin fandom. Sometimes, however, the dots have their own way of connecting. The Hanshin side of the ballpark was mostly sold out, so we wound up on Yakult side, surrounded by Swallows fans. Mid-way through the game, I granted his wish for a pair of Swallows ouen bats, and when Yakult won he high-fived his new umbrella-toting friends, and a Yakult fan was born. We’ve been back to Jingu, as well the visitor section of Tokyo Dome, several times, and nearly every morning my son awakens with the question “did Yakult win?”

Unfortunately, the answer to his question has been “no” a horrifying 67% of the time this year.

Yakult being uncompetitive isn’t a surprise. My preseason predictions had them edging Chunichi for fifth place in the Central League; I knew their pitching would be suspect, but thought that they’d score enough runs to stay out of the cellar. I missed the mark on that one, as the Swallows’ futility has been all-encompassing this year. Yakult ranks as the worst in the league in pitching, hitting, and defense. These realities are thoroughly reflected in their winning percentage, which is the worst in Japan.

Prior to my son’s Yakult fandom, it’s likely that I would have taken minimal notice of the Swallows misery, and eventually forgotten about it as I have many other last place teams. But having a relatively newfound emotional connection to this team has gotten me thinking, what would I do to fix the Swallows? And that question has given me a vehicle to (modestly) re-launch activity on NPB Tracker.

Over the next couple months, I’ll write a handful of posts outlining what my prospective approach would be if it was my job to establish Yakult as a competitive force. Along the way, I’ll take a look at the moves they make and offer my point of view. The rough framework for how I’ll look at this is something like this:

0 Surveying the Landscape, Picking a Strategy (this post)
1 Finding a Manager
2 Heading into the Draft
3 Offseason Reinforcements
4 Internal Prospects
5 Foreign Imports
6 Spring Training

Surveying the Landscape

Japan’s Central League has six teams, which are currently ranked the way I expect them to finish the season:

1. Hiroshima Carp
2. Hanshin Tigers
3. Yokohama DeNA Baystars
4. Yomiuri Giants
5. Chunichi Dragons
6. Tokyo Yakult Swallows

Taking a more general view…

Hiroshima — looks poised to stay at the top for the time being
Hanshin — blend of unproven young talent and aging veterans who, so far, are holding up
DeNA — solid lineup, three key starters acquired in the last two years have kept them in the mix this year
Yomiuri — strong frontline pitching, aging lineup, always a threat to spend in free agency
Chunichi — strong track record in acquiring foreign talent, star players from 2003-2012 golden era have retired and not been replaced
Yakult — no pitching depth, injuries and non-performance have taken toll on offense

It’s looking like this is Hiroshima’s era; I don’t think they will necessarily rattle off a long string of championships, but they’ll be in the conversation for at least the next couple of years. The other four teams are all better than the Swallows at the moment, though they all have weaknesses. Even so, Yakult is a couple of years and a couple of good drafts away from making things interesting in Yoyogi again.

So the immediate goal is to simply be less of a doormat, and give the Jingu fans reason to raise their umbrellas a few more times in 2018. Longer term the goal is to build a team that can contend for an extended period of time. How? My take is that in building a team, one can either raise the ceiling, or raise the floor. I think the approach I prefer with Yakult is to raise the floor, to try to replace the team’s worst performers with average ones. Time will tell if I can identify a reasonable strategy to accomplish that.

First things first though. Swallows manager Mitsuru Manaka has stepped down, and we’ll need to find a replacement. We’ll cover that in the next installment.

200. That’s how many editions of the Japan Baseball Weekly Podcast John Gibson and Jim Allen have released. If you haven’t checked it out, you’re in for a treat, JBW is perhaps the best kept secret in the baseball media. Having appeared in some form on about 10 of the 200 podcasts, I know exactly how much work goes into the planning and production of the show, which only increases my admiration of Jim and John for keeping it going for five years. Congratulations guys on 200 shows, and here’s to the next 200!

I missed my cue for my favorite JBW memories, but I have two, neither of which is a specific show. The first is that from June 2013 through April 2015, I had a job that required me to commute about an hour and a half each way, mostly by train. It was a long, and frequently exhausting, commute, and the JBW podcast helped pass the time. The second is just simply talking baseball with John and Jim the times I’ve made appearances. It’s always a lot of fun, and it’s great motivation to drag myself up and force myself to enjoy some baseball.

If I had to pick a memorable show, I think I’d have to go with this year’s Pacific League predictions series, which I appeared on with Claudio Rodrigues of Beisbol Japones, whom I had never met before. It was a great, rousing conversation, and there’s a funny story behind it, which I’ll let John decide if he wants to share.

And with that, I have episode #200 embedded for your listening pleasure right here. Listen for John making fun of me within the first two minutes of highlights 🙂

On September 13, 2015, the Central League achieved symmetry. Yomiuri beat DeNA 3-0, Chunichi tied Yakult 2-2, and Hanshin lost to Hiroshima 0-3. This is something of a microcosm of how the Central League pennant race has played out. For most of the second half of the season, Hanshin, Yakult and Yomiuri have taken turns holding first place, while Hiroshima hovers a few games back. Over the last two weeks, the race has tightened up even further, with four teams within 3 games of first place, and the top three locked in tie-like conditions.

(Standing as of Sept 13)

So who’s gonna win?

It’s still anyone’s pennant.

Remember that in Japan, the champion is whoever loses the fewest games, so this race is maybe even a little more neck and neck than it appears. In pretty much every game, each of the four contenders a chance to add to their win column, but also bump up an opponents lose column. But in doing so they also help their other rivals.

Erm, so who’s gonna win?

Let’s also point out that the top three placed teams will qualify for the playoffs, but the league champion gets a bye in the first stage of the Climax Series playoffs, and a one-game advantage in the second stage. Given the parity of the teams this year, that’s a big prize.

Right, okay, who’s gonna win?

Yakult wins if… their starting pitching holds up through the rest of September. The Swallows have been on a bit of a run lately, going 9-3-1 over the last three weeks. Over that stretch, rainouts and off days have allowed them to rely almost entirely on four starters: Yasuhiro “Ryan” Ogawa, Taichi Ishiyama, Masanori Ishikawa, and Shohei Tateyama. Over the second half of September, the Swallows will have 11 games over a stretch of 13 days, and will probably have to dig a little deeper in to their rotation, especially as Tateyama is returning from his third Tommy John surgery. A well-timed gutsy performance from a guy like Hirofumi Yamanaka or Orlando Roman could be the difference between a league title and a third-place finish. Key players: Yamanaka, Roman, Tateyama’s current ulnar collateral ligament.

Hanshin wins if… they can keep Hiroshima at bay, which they have so far not managed to do. Hanshin is 7-12-2 on the season against Hiroshima, but more importantly entered September with nine of their last 27 games to play against the Carp. So far five of those nine games have been played, and Hanshin is 1-3-1. Unfortunately for the Tigers, three of the remaining four games are on Hiroshima’s home ground, so their work is cut out for them, but they have to find a way to put a few losses on Hiroshima’s ledger. Aside from that, Hanshin has four more games against DeNA and Chunichi, whom they’ve enjoyed beating up on this year. The Tigers need take full advantage of their remaining opportunities to pad their record. Key players: Matt Murton and Mauro Gomez.

Yomiuri wins if… they can gain the upper hand on Yakult. The Tokyo rivals are an interesting matchup; Yakult having the league’s best offense, and Giants being the most adept at run prevention. The Swallows and Giants have perfectly split their 20 meetings so far this year, and have five left to play. Yomiuri’s pitchers have done a good job at keeping Yakult off the board, holding them to 3.1 runs per meeting, compared with their season average of 3.99. But they need to score runs to win, and in nine of their 10 losses to the Swallows, Yomiuri’s offense has put up three or fewer runs. Key player: anyone who happens to be holding a bat.

Hiroshima wins if… they can continue to beat Hanshin, and Yomiuri and Yakult trade wins with each other. After a vexing, underachieving season, the Carp have finally pulled up to the rest of the pack, though they are still on the outside looking in. The key to the remainder of Hiroshima’s season is sort of the inverse of Hanshin’s. They need to continue their success against the Tigers, and reverse their luck against the bottom-dwelling Dragons and Baystars. They Carp might be in first place if it wasn’t for their incompetence against the Central League’s worst two teams, whom they are a combined 16-26-1 against.  But if they can make that record look a little better over the seven games they have left against those two teams, they’ll obviously be in better shape. Key player: Brad Eldred. The Carp seem to win when he hits.

My prediction: I didn’t write it down at the time, but my pre-season pick was Hiroshima and I’m sticking with that. I’m giving them the league, beating Yakult’s winning percentage by a fraction. Hanshin stands to lose the most if Hiroshima succeeds, so I’ll pick them for fourth, with Yomiuri defaulting to third position.

A couple weeks ago, my friend John Gibson asked me to do a monthly NPB power rankings segment for his Japan Baseball Weekly podcast. I’ve been on the ‘cast a couple times and it’s always a lot of fun, so it was an easy decision to accept, despite my lack of recent writing activity.

The other thing that made this an easy decision is the opportunity to do something different with a concept like power rankings. I have to admit I’m not much of a fan of power rankings; I tend to think of them as subjective and lacking real analysis. So if I’m going to do this, I’m going to try to put my own spin on it. Even if turns out to be analytically shallow, it should at least be fun.

The question is how to rank the teams. For me, there is a spectrum of possible answers, ranging from “objective” to “subjective”. On the “objective” side of the spectrum, there’s data. Not just wins and losses and runs scored and allowed, but ideally atomic, granular data on each play, that should be more predictive of how a team is actually performing. On the other side, there’s eyeballs and intuition. “Sure, Hanshin is winning, but they don’t feel like a first place team.” Power is in the eye of the beholder.

In my first attempt I’ve come down somewhere in the middle. At the moment I don’t have the type of play data I want for an entirely data-driven approach, so I used data points that I thought were most indicative of each team’s ability to compete along with my own instincts. The top and bottom teams were pretty obvious; the middle tier not so much. The rankings will be in this week’s JPW podcast, so we’ll see how I did then.

According to multiple Media outlets out of Japan (such as Nikkan Sports) the Yokohama DeNA Baystars have signed Cuban infielder Yulieski Gourriel. Nikkan Sports quotes Gourriel as saying “Japan is known as a high-level league, so I’ve always wanted to try playing there. I’m very happy to have that hope fulfilled. I appreciate the Baystars for giving me this opportunity.”

Gourriel will wear number 10 for the ‘Stars, and his arrival in Japan is of yet undecided. No other details have been announced as of yet.

For more on Gourriel and Cuban players in NPB, please see this previous post.

Update, Sunday 11:30pm Pacific time: Sports Hochi reports that DeNA has a basic agreement in place with Gourriel. GM Takada cautions that “he’s not signed yet”, but DeNA has a representative in Cuba to complete the deal. The Baystars plan to play Gourriel at second base, and bat him third in the order. The article also mentions that Yuliesky’s father, Lourdes, played industrial league ball in Japan for Isuzu.

Word on the street (err, Japanese media) is that the Yokohama DeNA Baystars are looking to follow the Yomiuri’s acquisition of Frederich Cepeda with a Cuban splash of their own: infielder Yulieski Gourriel. Baystars GM Shigeru Takada was quoted in Sanspo as saying, “We’re headed in a good direction. It won’t take much time. We’re going to wrap up the talks.” Nikkan Sports adds that DeNA scouted Cuba in the offseason.

Cuban defectors Leslie Anderson and Yuniesky Betancourt are currently active in NPB, but Cepeda will be the first Cuban non-defector to play in Japan since an over-the-hill Omar Linares from 2002-2004. If a DeNA is able to conclude a deal with Gourriel, it’s tempting to think that Cuba could become a new, much-needed talent stream for NPB.

From a pure baseball standpoint, I don’t think I could possibly like the idea of this signing any more for DeNA. Part of it is personal bias; Gourriel has been a favorite of mine for years and I’ve written about wanting to see him in Japan as far back as 2009. But in addition to that, Gourriel is still 29 and logically has more of his prime left than Cepeda. And he seems like a good fit for DeNA’s non-pitching needs, as their offense has been sluggish in 2014 and second base has been a hole for years*.

Kudos to Takada and DeNA for going outside the box after a talent like Gourriel. Now, if they could only apply some creative thinking to their pitching woes…

*this assumes they play him at 2b.

Every article linked here is written in English:

• Writing for One World Sports, John Gibson urges observers to be patient with phenom Shohei Ohtani.
• Steve Novosel and Craig Roberts wrote up Lotte’s May 2-4 series with Seibu, which included Takayuki Kishi’s no-hitter.
• Wily Mo Pena hit a home run off the roof of Kyocera Osaka Dome on May 6, which I had never seen anyone do before. Gen Sueyoshi has details and a video clip.
• Jason Coskrey writes that the upstart Orix Buffaloes performance at the gate is lagging behind their performance in the win column.
• John Sickels looks back at the career of Chad Tracy, who spent a season in Japan with the Hiroshima Carp. Tracy recently retired.

As a bonus I’ll throw in this highlight of Yuki Nishi spearing a hard line drive that was on a course for his head.

Today’s Japanese word of the day is egui (エグい), which in a baseball context refers to a particularly “nasty” or “sick” pitch.

Hanshin sophomore Shintaro Fujinami’s hard splitter/sinker/shuuto is as about as egui as you’ll find in NPB.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Check out these gifs that I’ve gleefully borrowed from 2ch:

150 km/h is about 93.2 mph, 147 km/h is 91.3 mph.

…a later article appears. The delving begins.

The glass is half empty: only 91 NPB players earn JPY 100m ($1m) or more per year, a relative paucity compared to their Major League counterparts.

The glass is half full: 91 is more than 10% of the total number of NPB players and all 91 are probably quite happy to be earning such a comfortable income; the vast majority NPB farm leaguers earn JPY 4.4m ($44k) and up, a relative fortune compared with their MLB-affiliated minor league counterparts. Considering a review of Invest Diva can provide additional insights into managing finances and exploring opportunities for financial growth and stability.

So why don’t NPB players earn more? And more importantly, why haven’t NPB’s top salaries grown? Aside from the blips of Roberto Petagine and Tony Batista cracking JPY 700m ($7m) in the mid-aughts, the top salaries have leveled off at about JPY 600m ($6m).

This subject probably requires expertise or research that exceeds what I have to offer, but I do have a few observations, ordered numerically for convenient reference, rather than in order of precedence.

1. Most of the biggest stars move on MLB, rather than driving up their NPB salaries.
2. Domestic free agency does increase salaries, but is so restrictive that only a small percentage of eligible players even file.
3. Pre-free agency salaries tend to go year to year, and pay cuts for non-performance or injuries are a bit more common.
4. The almost complete lack of agents in NPB.
5. A cultural aversion to crossing the salary thresholds set by previous stars.
6. Payroll is spread more equitably across the entire baseball operation.
7. NPB teams are operated as business units of large corporations, rather than independent businesses funded by wealthy investors.

I would point to Hideki Matsui’s departure for the Yankees following the 2002 season as the starting point of NPB salary stagnation. Matsui’s salary in 2002 was JPY 610m, and while we’ve seen that line crossed a couple times (see above), the JPY 600m figure has essentially become the benchmark number for top-notch NPB players. Shinosuke Abe has this year’s top salary, at the magic JPY 600m mark. He could have had more, but he didn’t feel ready to surpass Matsui’s number. If he Abe had had an agent involved. I’m sure he would have nudged him in the direction of the higher paycheck.

Following the 2001 season, Yomiuri offered Matsui an eight-year, JPY 6bn ($60m), which would easily have . Had he taken the Kyojin-gun’s offer, that would have dragged the benchmark up to JPY 750m. Ichiro’s final NPB salary (2000) was JPY 550m. Yu Darvish’s was JPY 500m (2011). Kazuhiro Sasaki’s was JPY 500m (1999), then JPY 650m after he returned to Yokohama. It’s reasonable to think that any of these guys would have raised the bar as well, though none ever had a publicly-disclosed offer of the size of Matsui’s.

Epilogue: I suppose this doesn’t explain much. NPB teams are mostly operated as loss leaders, and the league as a whole has been less aggressive than MLB at developing new revenue streams. I could easily write a whole post exploring the balances sheets of NPB clubs, but the fact that they are less profitable than their MLB counterparts is a big piece of the puzzle here.