NPB Tracker

And so, my 12th season as an NPB fan has come to a close. Here’s how it happened:

Game 6 – Chunichi wins, 2-1:

• Both starters, Kazuki Yoshimi and Tsuyoshi Wada, look tired. It’s been a long haul for them: like everyone else, they started camp in early February and experienced the delayed start to the season; but both also logged over 180 innings over the course of the year, plus three postseason starts each.
• The guest commentator for game six? Yu Darvish. He didn’t really say anything interesting, at least not that I noticed.
• Softbank started a better offensive lineup, with Hiroki Kokubo playing first base and Nobuhiko Matsunaka DHing. In the first two games at Yahoo Dome, Kokubo DHed while Shuhei Fukuda played first, with Matsunaka on the bench.
• There was a great Softbank Hawks commercial with the Hawks players hitting line drives to each other.
• Toru Hosokawa’s flyout in the third inning seemed like it would have been a home run with the old ball.
• Chunichi got all of their offense out of the way in the first inning, courtesy of a two-run Kazuhiro Wada triple. After that, they never mounted much of a threat.
• Softbank’s bats were equally lifeless, more so than in any game since their listless effort against Wei-Yin Chen in game one.
• Four of the seven games resulted in a final score of 2-1.
• I must admit… my notes are a little lacking from this one… so I must again turn to Michael Westbay’s write-up. Plus, he has a YouTube video of that commercial I mentioned.

Lots of text today, so no intro here—just a few observations I’ve made about the Nippon Series so far. The ordering might be a little out of whack, but so be it. To bet on any player listed below, click on links such as 온카.

Game 1 – Chunichi wins 2-1 in ten innings:

Tsuyoshi Wada took a no-hitter into the 7th inning, when he surrendered a home run to Kazuhiro Wada. Wada nibbled a bit, and Chunichi had better at-bats the third time through the lineup, but he maintained his command and only gave up one hard-hit ball aside from Kazuhiro’s home run.

Wei-Yin Chen looked different than every other time I’ve seen him, including the two games I watched this year. The Chen I’m used to throws a fastball in the 145-150 km/h range, a slider, a two-seam/shuuto with some late horizontal movement, and a forkball with inconsistent command, working up and down the inside and outside parts of the zone. The Chen I saw on Saturday gave up some fastball velocity, maxing out at 145 km/h but frequently working below 140 km/h, though with better command than usual. Yahoo’s data listed Chen’s primary breaking pitch as a slider, but it moved more like a changeup and worked extremely well.

Wada’s line: 8 IP, 29 BF, 119 pitches, 2 hits, 1 HR, 8 K, 2 BB, 1 R, 1 ER.
Chen’s line: 8 IP, 29 BF, 124 pitches, 4 hits, 0 HR, 11 K, 2 BB, 1 R, 1 ER.

Softbank’s lineup was disappointing. I thought they would start recognizing Chen’s good breaking stuff and wait for his average fastballs as the game progressed, but they actually got worse after their first time through the lineup. Hitoshi Tamura and Munenori Kawasaki were particularly bad in the later innings.

Yahoo Dome’s artificial turf looked like a pretty bad playing surface. Kawasaki made an error on a hard line drive that seemed to take an odd bounce, then made a nice play on a softer hit up the middle that took an unpredictable bounce.

Chunichi won this game with home runs: the aforementioned Wada’s no-hitter breaker, and Masaaki Koike’s winning shot in the 10th off an errant Takahiro Mahara forkball. Koike’s home run immediately followed some stats on the television broadcast about the lack of home runs in NPB this season.

Mini-rant: Kawasaki led off the bottom of the first with a single, and what did manager Koji Akiyama do? Immediately bunts him over, with a good on-base guy. I get that these are tight games, but why take the bat out of your guy’s hands in the first inning?

Game 2 – Chunichi wins 2-1 in ten innings:

This game was started by two of my favorite pitchers to watch: Toshiya Sugiuchi and Kazuki Yoshimi.
Sugiuchi didn’t quite have his best swing-and-miss stuff, like the last couple of times I’ve seen him. He had his pop-out stuff.
Sugiuchi’s one big mistake pitch was a fat 136 km/h fastball up in the zone in the 7th inning, which Ryosuke Hirata smacked off the left field fence for a double. Another meter or so, and that ball would have been gone, and the Dragons wouldn’t have needed Mahara to choke again.

Yoshimi wasn’t really at his best, but he generated a ton of groundballs and quieted each of Softbank’s threats until leaving with the bases loaded in the 7th. Takuya Asao mostly bailed him out, allowing only one run on a Kawasaki single. The damage might have been worse if Softbank’s third base coach had sent Tamura instead of holding him at third—it looked like he had a chance to score.

Softbank again played a conservative game—lots of sacrifice bunting, holding Tamura at third.

Chunichi’s Motonobu Tanishige still has a good arm at age 40.
Hiromitsu Ochiai had the umpires check the tape on Seiichi Uchikawa’s bat in the third inning. Uchikawa changed bats, then lined to center on Yoshimi’s first pitch.

Softbank’s lineup isn’t executing. In Game 2, they had runners on base in each of the first five innings, including runners in scoring position in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th innings, but failed to score each time.

Mahara wasn’t that bad in Game 2. He lost, but his only really poor at-bat was when he walked Kazuhiro Ibata without really challenging him.

Highlights from the 1999 Daiei-Chunichi Nippon Series – Akiyama was awesome as a player. Rodney Pedraza showed up in the highlights too.
For some reason, I kept expecting to see Norihiro Nakamura emerge from Chunichi’s bench during Game 2.

Another mini-rant: After Hiroki Kokubo led off the 2nd with a double, Akiyama had Yuya Hasegawa—another good contact hitter—bunt him over to third. Kokubo was stranded there after another listless strikeout by Tamura and a groundout from Shuhei Fukuda. Akiyama bunted Kokubo over after his leadoff single in the 4th as well, with equivalent futility. Ironically, the bunt attempt I agreed with was with Tamura in the 7th, but he couldn’t get it down and ended up singling with two strikes.

Overall, I’d say Ochiai is out-managing Akiyama so far. The Dragons are clearly making better adjustments at the plate throughout the game, and though Akiyama can’t really be faulted for Mahara choking, Ochiai has created better matchups with his bullpen.

Alright, it has been a while since I’ve done one of these posts, but I have been reading. Here’s a list of stories I’ve gathered up over the last month, in roughly chronological order. Most of the source content is Japanese but there are a few English items in there.

• Back in early December, Osamu Yamamoto of the Chugoku Shimbun shed some light on the Hiroshima Carp’s US scouting practices, and shared some evaluations of players that the Carp signed over the last few years. Among this year’s signings, Dennis Sarfate graded at the top of the team’s five point scale with an A, while Chad Tracy and Bryan Bullington punched in a notch below at the AB level. Hiroshima has also added former Carp player Scott McClain as a second US-based scout.
• Yakult lefty Masato Nakazawa has gotten married.
• Speaking of weddings, Yankees lefty farmhand Naoya Okamoto attended one in Kyoto, where he bumped into several former teammates. Judging by the pictures, I’m concerned Okamoto may have joined a gang (笑).
• A personal favorite of mine, Nagisa Arakaki has signed for 25% pay cut next season. Once upon a time I thought Arakaki was Japan’s next great pitcher, but he’s been done in by injuries. Hopefully he’s able to come back, but I fear his days as a power pitcher are over.
• Kengo Kubo of Nikkan Sports fills us in on Yomiuri Giants representative Hidetoshi Kiyotake’s ideas for increasing Japanese participation abroad, including establishing a “Team Japan” to play in overseas winter leagues. This year, six players including Yoshiyuki Kamei played in Australia. Hopefully I’ll find some time to write more about this subject because there are some interesting ideas out there.
• Sanpo reports that Yusei Kikuchi has signed a management contract with talent agency HoriPro, the first active baseball player to do so.
• Norichika Aoki’s 2011 goal is to surpass Ichiro’s record of 210 hits within the first 130 games of the season. Incidentally, Ichiro’s 1994 pace translates to 232 hits over the current 144-game schedule.
• Hiroshima’s Kenta Maeda was quoted in Sanspo as saying he’d like to “try going to the Majors”, in response to a question from pro golfer Mika Miyazato. However, a couple days after he said this, Gen over at Yakyubaka.com found him contradicting himself.
• Former Yakult Swallow Jaime D’Antona was on the field when Matt Murton broke Ichiro’s hits record, and shared his thoughts on the official Swallows blog. Here’s an excerpt: “It was great also, since it was at Jingu,to see our fans appreciate his achievement and cheer for him with the Tigers fans. That showed a lot of class for our fans and proves we have great baseball fans, not just all or nothing Swallows fans. I think that is important in sports and you don’t see that too often.” I caught this one via the Tokyo Swallows Twitter feed, and recommend following them if you happen to use Twitter.
• Yoshiaki Kanemura looks back on Hideo Nomo’s historic move to the Dodgers.
• Like Aoki, Softbank’s Munenori Kawasaki is taking aim at the single-season hits record next year. As part of his offseason training, he’s working on hitting bad pitches. Last year, Kawasaki finished just behind Murton, Aoki and Tsuyoshi Nishioka with a Hawks-record 190 hits.
• The great Mister-Baseball.com has covered the Australian Baseball League this season, which Kamei and Shuhei Fukuda participated in.
• Deanna attended some bounenkai (year-end) parties and found this cool glass.
• Nikkan Sports reports that Rusty Ryal will by paid 100m yen (lazy conversion: $1.2m) and play third base for Yomiuri. Rusty’s dad Mark played for Chunichi.
• Yomiuri’s Kiyotake commented again on Winter Leagues on the 24th in Sanspo, saying that he had a “request for players from Puerto Rico”, and that he wants to get players “opportunities in competitive games overseas.”