NPB Tracker

Update: Looks like this caught at least one of the players mentioned by surprise. Keep in mind, the story is about a list of guys the Tigers are looking at and not necessarily in active negotiations with.

One of the fringe benefits Hanshin trying to get out of bringing in Kenji Johima is some additional scouting intelligence on pitchers in MLB organizations. Aside from Jeff Williams, Hanshin’s only sustained import success over the last several years has been righty Scott Atchison, who is leaving the team this offseason. After Atchison, Jerrod Riggan was good while he lasted and Darwin Cubillan had his moments, but that’s pretty much where it ends.

Sports Hochi Osaka has a list of candidates Hanshin is looking at, compiled presumably with Joh’s input:

• Ryan Rowland-Smith
• Chris Jakubauskas
• Bobby Keppel
• DJ Carrasco

I can’t believe that the Mariners would move Rowland-Smith, but Hanshin has the right idea with him. Carrasco spent a year in Japan with SoftBank and didn’t have a favorable experience, so I’d be surprised if he came back. Jakubauskas and Keppel sound about right.

Sanspo adds a few more names to the list, most of which we’ve seen before:

• Brad Thomas
• Juan Morillo
• Jo Jo Reyes
• Wil Ledezma
• Charlie Haeger

The only new name on this list is Haeger, who is an interesting candidate. We don’t see a lot of knuckleballers in NPB.

In related news, Hanshin has announced that they are cutting ties with Jeff Williams, Scott Atchison, Kevin Mench and Aarom Baldiris, while moving to retain Craig Brazell and Kai-Wen Cheng. None of this is really news either, except that Williams has come out and said that he wants to return to the team after rehabbing for the next year. He’ll be about 40 if he can return in 2011, but here’s hoping he can come back and end his career properly.

Little-known fictitious fact: today, November 5, is the date in 1955 that Marty McFly travelled back to. So with today being a footnote in fictitious history, I thought it was a good time for a post on some real history.

Rob Fitts, author of Remembering Japanese Baseball and Wally Yonamine’s biography, has just kicked off a new project, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the tour that brought Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and American spy Moe Berg to Japan. Over the next month, Rob will be chronicling the all-star tour, day by day as it happened in 1934. I’m looking forward to the November 20th entry, which should cover Eiji Sawamura’s famous performance against the American stars.

The Chiba Lotte Marines have reportedly agreed to trade Naoyuki Shimizu to the Yokohama BayStars for pitcher Takumi Nasuno and catcher Shinji Ninuma.The trade has not yet been officially announced.

Shimizu is entering the second year of a two-year contract, and has an opt-out clause to pursue an MLB this offseason. He recently suggested that he’s still interested in testing the overseas market, and dismissed any possibility of leaving Lotte to sign with another NPB club. It will obviously remain to be seen how his contract will play out with a trade — does the out clause remain valid after a trade? And if so, will his preference for Lotte lead him to exercise it after being traded?

In any case, this trade looks like a salary dump for Lotte. I’m not high on Shimizu’s MLB credentials (think Kirk Saarloos), but he’s a decent NPB innings eater, and Lotte would not be getting equal value back in Nasuno and Ninuma. Lotte’s baseball club lost 2.8bn yen ($28m) in 2008, and had a stated goal of getting that number down to 1bn yen ($10m). Getting Shimizu’s 280m yen ($2.8m) for 2010 off the books along with Bobby’s salary will go quite a ways in reducing expenses, though the team will likely take a hit at the gates.

Sanspo is reporting on Hanshin’s import pitching shopping list, and is naming names. Tigers manager Akinobu Mayumi says that Hanshin is after two middle relievers and one starter, to fill in for the departing Scott Atchison and Jeff Williams.

The names we have are:

• Adrian Burnside (recently released by Yomiuri)
• Brad Thomas (two-year Japan veteran, had been in Korea)
• Jo Jo Reyes (Atlanta Braves)
• Wil Ledezma (Washington Nationals)
• Juan Morillo (Minnesota Twins)
• Bob Keppel (Minnesota Twins)

Burnside didn’t appear at all with Yomiuri’s top team this year, so you’d have to figure he’d be a low-risk, low-investment type of signing. Thomas probably fits into the same category.

Reyes is an interesting name. He’s still pretty young, and I had the impression that he was a decent prospect for the Braves at one point. Morillo, as I recall from his time with the Rockies, is a hard thrower with bad command. I don’t know much about the other guys.

Two guys I’d like to see get a shot in Japan, with Hanshin or elsewhere, are Lenny DiNardo and Bobby Korecky. I couldn’t understand why DiNardo didn’t get more of a look in Oakland, when I saw him I thought he could contribute in the bigs (though I didn’t realize he had such a troubling k/bb rate). And Korecky is a guy who I haven’t seen, but has performed consistently well in the minors but never gotten a real shot to last in MLB.

Yu Darvish returned after a nearly two-month layoff to pitch game two of the Japan Series.  Though still not at 100%, he pitched well enough to win. The data we have shows that he relied more heavily on his curveball than usual, so let’s take a look at what adjustments he made in his delivery.

This is a very high quality video — the best I’ve seen on YouTube.

Now let’s take a look at some footage from earlier in the season, when he was healthy. The following are clips from Darvish’s July 15 start against the Hawks. I chose the July 15 game completely arbitrarily; I would have rather looked at footage from a more recent start but was unable to quickly locate any on YouTube.

As you can see, Darvish was a lot quicker to the plate in the July 15 game, and was landing harder on his front foot. Darvish also didn’t have that pause a the top of his windup, but he did use it later in the season.

Even without the pause, Darvish looked a lot more deliberate to the plate in game two, had a step back with his left foot, and was softer on his follow through than before. It looked to me like he was twisting his torso a bit more in game two as well.

It speaks to Darvish’s talent that he could come back after almost two months out, with altered mechanics, and shut down Japan’s top lineup.

The Giants took game one of the Japan Series last night, beating Nippon Ham behind a rather hittable Dicky Gonzales. This is another post I had meant to go to prior to the Series starting, but that’s the way things go some times.

So on to the scattered thoughts and observations…

• If you would have told me at the beginning of the year that Gonzales would start game one of the Japan Series, I would have laughed pretty hard.
• Deanna and Gen went to their usual levels of detail in covering game one.
• Yu Darvish has been out of commission for quite a while now, but he it looks like he’s starting game two for Nippon Ham. Tetsuya Utsumi gets the call for the Giants.
• Speaking of Darvish, he’s been throwing lefthanded again.
• I know a game has already been played so it’s too late to say this, but I like Yomiuri’s roster over Nippon Ham’s. I like Yomiuri’s depth in this series.
• On the other hand, the last time Nippon Ham won the Japan Series (2006), Darvish was partnered at the front of the Figthers’ rotation by Tomoya Yagi, who won the Rookie of the Year award that season. After winning in ’06, Yagi promptly faded into injured-list oblivion, and Darvish became the best pitcher in Japan. This year, Yagi made a comeback, posting a 2.88 ERA in 122 innings, and Ham is back in the Series.
• It’s interesting to see Nippon Ham playing Yomirui in the Series. Prior to Ham moving to Hokkaido, the Fighters shared the Tokyo Dome with the Giants, and seemed to be operating in Yomiuri’s shadow. It seemed like the Fighters used to frequently sign ex-Giants, but the only notable example I can think of is Hiromitsu Ochiai. Once the Fighters moved to Hokkaido and got out from under the Giants’ shadow, they got competitive.
• I missed a chance to post on this earlier, but I’ll do so now — when Nippon Ham eliminated Rakuten from the Climax Series, it marked the (latest) end to manager Katsuya Nomura’s career. I wouldn’t call myself a Nomura fan, but he is certainly a character, and as such I suppose this picture of him putting away his uniform for the last time is a little sad. After Nippon Ham’s win, both sides honored Nomura with the traditional celebratory douage (click the link if you don’t know what that is). This is, I think, an important distinction for Japanese baseball from American baseball. Nippon Ham won the game and the series, and it was very much their day, but the winning players and Nippon Ham fans still celebrated Nomura after the game.

I don’t think I’ll be up to watch the game tonight, so if anyone checks it out on justin.tv, please click the ‘watch later’ link, and paste the url into a comment.

Sponichi is reporting that the Indians have agreed to a minor-league contract with Chuo University righthander Takafumi Nakamura.

Nakamura wasn’t a high-profile draft prospect, so I headed over to Draft Reports to get the scoop on him. Nakamura has got a big frame at 195 cm, 89kg (6’5, 195lbs), and throws from a three-quarter delivery. His heater tops out on the gun at 149 km/h (92mph), but he mostly sits at about 140 km/h (86 mph) with both his fastball and slider. He also has a curve, forkball, and shuuto. Looking at his stats, he shown an ability to strike his college competition out, but walks have been an issue.

Sponichi says that the Indians’ goal is to get him in shape in Rookie Ball, and then give him a look at Single-A after a couple of months. An official contract is expected in November.

I stumbled across this clip a while ago, and normally I wouldn’t post it, but there’s a personal back story and with this year’s Nippon Series about to start, it seems like a good time.

1994 was the year the MLB players’ strike canceled the World Series, which I especially hated because my team, the Chicago White Sox, was in the middle of a great season and I fully expected to see them reach the Series. Chicago doesn’t win in baseball very often, and I felt like we were getting screwed out of the best team that had come along to that point in my lifetime.

So with no World Series, Chicago’s local cable sports station, SportsChannel, broadcast the Japan Series on tape delay, with the games called by Hawk and Wimpy. To that point, just about everything I knew about Japan came by way of Nintendo, and Japanese baseball was something new to me. It was familiar but different, it kind of looked like the SF Giants playing the KC Royals. The only players I knew were Dan Gladden and Mike Pagliarulo, though Henry Cotto also appears in this clip.

So this is what piqued my interest in Japanese baseball, but I didn’t really get into it permanently until 2000, when I went I went to Japan as an exchange student. And of course the White Sox won the World Series in 2005, which made up for the missed opportunity in ’94.

Some notes about foreign player movement this offseason, mostly featuring the Chiba Lotte Marines:

• Pete Laforest had a tryout with the Seibu Lions, the results of which will be announced in a few days. Laforest has spent the last few years in the Mexican League. It’s rare for NPB teams to go after import catchers, so I’m wondering how Laforest would fit on to the Lions’ roster.
• The SoftBank Hawks are retaining DJ Houlton and Jose Ortiz for next season. You’d have to think they’ll bring Brian Falkenborg back as well.
• Hanshin is looking for Kenji Johjima to provide input on next year’s foreign roster.
• Chiba Lotte is looking at bringing in Marlins lefty minor leaguer Carlos Vasquez to pitch relief. Vasquez played for Venezuela in last year’s WBC. At the same time, the Marines want reliable bullpen arm Brian Sikorski to take a 33% pay cut, and may lose him this offseason.
• More from Lotte: the team is looking at bringing former Marine and Hawk Julio Zuleta back to Japan. He’ll have a tryout in early November, and if he passes, the team will look at him as a low-budget option ($300k) for next year. Zuleta struggled in the Mexican League in 2009.
• Yeet more from Lotte: the Marines are again looking at Korean slugger Kim Dong Ju this offseason. Kim has been trying to sign with an NPB club for years, and Bobby wanted to bring him to Chiba last season, but got denied by the front office.

Here are some unorganized, rapid-fire notes about yesterday’s draft. Some of these are my own observations, others are from the media.

• In the end, ‘only’ six teams went after Yusei Kikuchi in the first round. Still impressive, but not exactly an unprecedented number. It seemed that the other teams used the distraction of Kikuchi to nab the guy they wanted.
• Despite this being considered a thin draft, the only player that was selected by more than one team in the first round was Kikuchi.
• Kikuchi’s parents are happy with the outcome of the draft.
• The one team that should have been in on Kikuchi, but wasn’t, was Yokohama, who took slugger Yoshitomo Tsutsugo with their first pick. This looks like a case where the team allowed the appeal of taking the local kid outweigh the choice that really best fit their needs (pitching).
• I think Hiroshima made a great first round pick in Takeru Imamura, and then followed it up with strong picks with Shota Dobayashi, Hisashi Takeuchi, and Hayato Shoji. I could just be biased towards fame though; Takeuchi is a well-known college pitchers and the other guys were noted Koshien performers. Shoji put a lot of mileage on his arm at this year’s Koshien.
• Hisayoshi Chono finally wound up with the Giants.
• Fat, short first baseman Ryoji Nakata got taken in the third round by Chunichi. He’ll need to get into shape as a pro, and even then I still think he looks more like a pinch hitter than a starter.
• Honda hurler Takao Suwabe was annoyed at not being picked until the sixth round, and might not sign because of that.
• In another bittersweet result, high school righty Takumi Akiyama cried at lasting until Hanshin drafted him in the fourth round, but vowed to do his best at Koshien.
• In more tear news, Kenta Imamiya wept for joy at being selected by his local SoftBank Hawks in the first round.
• I’m looking forward to seeing how Shuichi Furukawa, Yutaka Ohtsuka, and Yosuke Okamoto do as pros.
• I was wondering why Akihiro Hakumura wasn’t drafted, but it turns out he’s going to college rather than the pros.
• Former Braves farmhand Masayoshi Tokuda was not taken by the Carp, despite ‘passing’ their tryout.
• A couple other non-picks I was slightly disappointed with were Michiya Minato and Shogo Akiyama. Admittedly I haven’t seen much of either of these guys, but they both seem to have good pitchers’ frames, decent velocity and command issues (particularly Akiyama on the last point). I was hoping to see if they’d develop as pros.