NPB Tracker

The news that Texas signed Dutch infielder Nick Urbanus caught my eye — Rogier van Zon told me ab out him back in 2009 when I interviewed him about Dutch baseball.

I wanted to learn more about Urbanus, so I asked an international scout about his game.

Nicky is a third-generation ballplayer. His father and grandfather are Dutch greats and he has it in his blood. He is a shortstop with very good instincts and plus makeup. Defensively he’ll be a very good middle infielder. Maybe he’ll be forced to second base for his arm, but I’d give him every chance to stick at short. He’s got very good hands and feet. He’s also a good athlete with a line drive swing to all fields. Lacks some power, but will hit his share of doubles and squares most pitches off. Seeing him handle US pitchers is going to be interesting and I really like his chances.

While I was at it, I also asked about Max Kepler, who signed with the Twins last year and made his US debut in the Gulf Coast League this year:

Kepler is an outstanding athlete with a fantastic frame. I think he’ll be a RF long term, but he has the chance to be a true 5-tool player. With him they’ll need patience, but he oozes with tools and only needs time to put things together.

Since we had gone that far, I asked who the other top European prospects currently active in the minors are:

Well, I’d have to say (Alex) Liddi and Kepler. Kepler has the best ceiling, while Liddi is obviously much closer and accomplished. I also like a few sleepers on the Twins: (Tom) Stuifbergen, (Matej) Hejma, (Andrei) Lobanov. Kai Gronauer is also an advanced defensive catcher who has to improve offensively. But several teams are working well in Europe right now and they’re catching up. It just happens that Mariners (they also signed (Greg) Halman before Liddi) and Twins were among the pioneers in European scouting and have had a strong presence for years.

Interestingly, Gronauer’s name came up in Jan Benner’s 2009 guest piece on German baseball.

If you search this site, you’ll get posts dating as far back as two years ago of me saying that NPB teams should consider Mike Hessman. It looks like that’s happening now, as Daily Sports is reporting Orix has him on their list of replacements for the apparently departing Alex Cabrera. Orix is also close to signing ex-Yomiuri Giant Seung-Yeop Lee, surprisingly for a reported 150m yen. Even with Lee, I think Hessman would be a good addition for Orix. He would give them some pop from the right side of the plate, and offers some depth at third should Aarom Baldiris falter.

Hessman is coming off a good season with 3A Buffalo, one that saw him significantly cut down on his strikeout rate and get called up to Mets in the second half of the season. Unfortunately, he hit a meager .132 at the MLB level, and at 32 looks like a textbook 4A player. Japan is a good option for him.

I haven’t done a great job of staying up to date with NPB transactions this offseason. To catch up on things, here’s my tally of who’s signed so far this autumn:

• Bryan Bullington signed with Hiroshima
• Chad Tracy signed with Hiroshima
• Dennis Sarfate signed with Hiroshima
• Jonathan Albaladejo signed with Yomiuri
• Carlos Torres signed with Yomiuri.
• Micah Hoffpauir signed with Nippon Ham
• Marcos Vechionacci is about to sign as an ikusei player with Hanshin.
• Robert Zarate signed as an ikusei player with Hanshin
• Wladimir Balentien signed with Yakult

In addition, Hiroshima added Scott McClain as a US-based scout.

This year, I published my list of picks for Japan-bound players over at FanGraphs. So far I’ve gotten two correct, Bullington and Torres. I took a long look at Sarfate and Albaladejo, but I left Sarfate off because of his walk rate, and Albaladejo off because I thought he’d get a job in the Majors. I also asked FanGraphs’ readers to suggest players who could go over, and so far that list has produced one correct prediction, Hoffpauir.

After an on-again-off-again sort of negotiation, Chang Yong Lim has agreed to a deal that will keep him in the Yoyogi area of Tokyo. The headlines are calling it a three-year, 1.42 bn yen deal, but read a little more carefully and you’ll see that it’s really a two-year, 750m yen deal, with a mutual option for year three.

Yakult is reportedly now going after pitcher Young-Soo Bae, of the KBO’s Samsung Lions.

I thought Yakult might be a possible landing spot for Marc Kroon, but that’s a lot less likely with Lim returning. At this point, Rakuten seems like his best shot at a closing job in 2011.

Author’s note: I wrote this last Wednesday, before the Thanksgiving holiday, but decided not to publish it and deleted it. For some reason, it was not deleted, and I’ve changed my mind and decided to publish it, with a few edits.

Without assessing blame, I have to say that I’m quite disappointed at the way Oakland-Hisashi Iwakuma negotiations have gone. Being a resident of the Bay Area, I was really looking forward to the opportunity to watch each one of his starts and seeing if my optimism in him was justified. It’s not too late for the two sides to work out a deal but it isn’t looking good.

Iwakuma’s agent Don Nomura was a constant presence in the Japanese media for a few days after talks broke down last weekend. This Sponichi piece with his comments on the posting system caught my eye.

“This system is extremely one-side. The team (that acquired negotiating rights) can offer a minor league contract (and break off negotiations) without losing anything. The player’s side is at a disadvantage.”

“The top three bidding teams should get negotiating rights.”

Despite my afore stated disappointment, I find this kind of perversely poignant. Nomura’s gaming of the system in the 90’s led to the creation of the posting system. It seems oddly appropriate that he’s now frustrated by its limitations.

Neither side is without fault here — Iwakuma’s camp should have known that they were leaving a lot of negotiating leverage on the table by pursuing the posting process. And why did Oakland put in such an outsized bid (third biggest winning posting fee), only to follow it up with a seemingly low-ball offer? We’re missing some data and the story isn’t over yet, so we’ll just have to see how it plays out.

This is something I’ve always wanted to do — find a way to be more supportive of people learning Japanese. I occasionally get asked to translate things, but only rarely do those queries come from a Japanese learner.

So here’s a mini Japanese lesson, consisting of terms that are contextual to the offseason and hot stove league. Many of these terms won’t appear in your run-of-the-mill Japanese class, but you will find most of them on Nihongodict.com.

Obviously, this isn’t a comprehensive list. If anyone out there has any questions or any terms to add to the list, fire away in the comments.

Update: In the press conference, Lotte’s management only said they would accept the high bid and didn’t identify the winning bidder. It’s been all over the place this morning that the Twins had the high bid.

The news is a day old at this point, but Tsuyoshi Nishioka has drawn at least one bid via the posting process. The Chiba Lotte Marines are expected to accept the high bid regardless of its amount, and have scheduled a press conference for November 26th (JST).

Here’s hoping things go better for Nishioka than they have for Hisashi Iwakuma.

On Friday, I found an article that I liked and “tweeted” it,  which my friends at MLB Trade Rumors then picked up and wrote a post on. Within a half hour of the MLBTR post, journalist Nick Piecoro had refuted the information in the original article with one of the principles of the story.

What was the story? A summary and some speculation about the Diamondbacks interest in Lotte reliever Hiroyuki Kobayashi. The story included a quote from D-Backs GM Kevin Towers, one that he made in late September: “We have strong interest in Japanese pitchers. Once we size up the market, if we decide that Japanese pitchers like Hiro Kobayashi fit our team we’ll move to acquire them.” The article went on to say that the Diamondbacks have “already prepared a contract of around $3m over two years,” and explain the team’s bullpen issues and Towers’ experience acquiring Akinori Otsuka.

It seemed plausible enough, and still does, but got denied pretty quickly. Two things jump out at me here, both related to Twitter. The first is the speed at which this took place — from the time I saw the article it only took a tweet, a blog post, a text message and another tweet to shoot the news down. The second is the limitations of Twitter as a vehicle for information. One of Twitter’s founding fathers, Evan Williams, recently said “we’ve lowered the barriers to publishing almost as far as they can go.” While that’s true, the 140 character format of Twitter messages isn’t conducive to including a lot of qualifying contextual information. Twitter is a great way to build an audience and communicate with readers, but it turns out that it’s not terribly compatible with my style of making information available.

Further Edit: Apparently, the four-year, $30m figure that Sponichi reported is inaccurate.

Update, Sunday Night: It’s being widely reported that Iwakuma will return to Rakuten next season. The Mainichi Shimbun has a piece with quotes attributed to Iwakuma’s agent (Don Nomura) as saying “the two sides won’t sit down at the negotiating table again” and “after our first proposal, we were thinking we had a compromise through negotiation, but the Athletics seemed to think ‘if you can’t take this price, you don’t have to come here’. That wasn’t a condition we could accept.”

Meanwhile, Sponichi is saying that Iwakuma was looking for a deal for four years, $30m, but the A’s were only offering $3.5 – $3.75 annually. Paraphrasing Sponichi, that’s about what Iwakuma has been making in Japan, and he’s used to seeing starting pitchers who move to MLB get a big raise relative to their last season in NPB. Such are the perils of the posting, in my opinion.

I thought Rakuten might try to post him again this offseason, but the rules stipulate that under this scenario, the player can’t be posted again until November 1 of the following year. By then, Iwakuma should have completed enough service time to qualify for free agency.

Sunday Afternoon: Interesting news from my fellow Bay Area-ian, Susan Slusser: negotiations between Oakland and Hisashi Iwakuma are not going well and the two sides are far apart on a deal. Supposedly, the A’s are offering a deal of about fours year, $15m, while Iwakuma’s side is looking for about $15m per year. Barry Zito money, to use a particularly poor comparison. Shinya Tsuruta of Chunichi Sports puts negotiations at three years, $20m, which sounds a lot more reasonable.

The news broke yesterday in Japan, while I was taking a day off from writing. Sponichi had the first coverage of the story that I saw, and called the idea that Iwakuma might remain with Rakuten a “worst case scenario.” Tsuruta also pointed out that Iwakuma will take part in Rakuten’s Fan Appreciation Day on the 23rd, though his participation is qualified with the quote “it’s just as the words say, an event to show appreciation to the fans.” But the idea he could stay in Sendai is picking up steam. Iwakuma was signed for 2011 at 300-400m yen ($3.6-$4.8m), so I assume he would play for Rakuten under the terms of that contract should he and the A’s fail to work out a deal.

What no one seems to be saying is that Iwakuma is leaving a lot of money on the table in pursuing the posting route to the Majors. The posting system, by definition, assigns the player’s negotiating rights to a single team, and a large posting fee acts as a dis-incentive for the team to sign the player to a large contract (or rather, the posting fee is only viable if the player can be signed for a below-market rate). If Iwakuma were to return to Rakuten for 2011, barring injury he would be eligible for international free agency after the season. On the open market, I would expect him to command somewhere between $8m and $12m per season, for about three years. So in the end it will be up to Iwakuma to decide if getting to the Majors one year sooner is worth it.

The other day, NPB held its awards ceremony and announced the winners of this year’s MVP, Rookie of the Year, and Best Nine awards. Gen over at Yakyu Baka has transcribed all the winners (MVP/RoY, Best Nines), which saves me the trouble of doing it here. I don’t plug Gen often enough, so here’s another link — go and look at his site.

I published my picks about a month ago, and amazingly, the NPB voters mostly agreed with me. But there were a few differences.

Pacific League MVP — my pick: Tsuyoshi Nishioka (Lotte SS), winner: Tsuyoshi Wada (Softbank SP)

Wow. I don’t think I can disagree with this more strongly. NPB MVP voters have an annoying habit of favoring players from the league winner. That, combined with Wada’s one win more than Softbank teammate Toshiya Sugiuchi, was enough to propel him to the award. Nishioka had a historic year in which he drove Lotte’s league-leading offense with 206 hits and 121 runs (17% of Lotte’s total). Penalizing him because his team finished 2.5 games out of first is both archaic and illogical. Then again, maybe the voters were punishing him because he is a bit of a prima donna, or because he’s bolting for MLB.

Pacific Leage RoY — my pick: Keisuke Kattoh (Softbank RP), winner Ryo Sakakibara (Nippon Ham RP)

I didn’t realize Sakakibara was eligible; I guess that’s why I’m not an official voter. Kattoh finished second, no complaints.

Pacific League Best Nine P — my pick Yu Darvish (Nippon Ham), winner Tsuyoshi Wada (Softbank)

Not much to say here — Darvish was superior to Wada in every category except wins. I would have put Sugiuchi and Chihiro Kaneko ahead of Wada as well, so he would have been my fourth choice for this award.

Pacific League Best Nine 2B — my pick Tadahito Iguchi (Lotte), winner Kensuke Tanaka (Nippon Ham)

I was actually kind of on the fence about this one. In the end I took Iguchi’s glove, power and walks over Tanaka’s batting average. The voters didn’t agree though, and Iguchi finished in third. In second was Softbank’s Yuichi Honda who hit .296 and led the PL with 59 steals.  Yasuyuki Kataoka would have been my third choice, but he finished a distant fourth despite better overall numbers than Honda.

Pacific League Best Nine OF — my picks Teppei (Rakuten), Yoshio Itoi (Nippon Ham), winners Takumi Kuriyama (Seibu), T-Okada (Orix)

I picked T-Okada as the DH on my Best Nine, so I can live with him winning as an outfielder. I just don’t see how Kuriyama beats either Teppei or Itoi though, particularly Itoi, who was superior in slugging, on-base percentage, and base stealing.

Pacific League Best Nine DH — my pick Okada, winner Kazuya Fukuura (Lotte)

Fukuura put up a respectable .295/.354/.475 line, but didn’t get enough at-bats to qualify for the batting title.

Remarkably, the voters and I only disagreed on one Central League award:

Central League Best Nine SS — my pick Hayato Sakamoto (Yomiuri), winner Takashi Toritani (Hanshin)

I succumbed to the shiny allure of Sakamoto’s 31 home runs on this one. Toritani had a better batting average and on-base percentage, and made fewer errors.