Major League clubs are more cautious with Japanese talent pool

Mariah Carey throws first pitch in Japan Baseball League game

The Japanese market could be back on a bull run.

Yu Darvish’s six-year, $60 million deal with the Rangers made him a big leaguer on Wednesday, but will the right-hander also become the vanguard of a Japanese renaissance?

The buzz over the 25-year-old Nippon ace — before, during and since his posting — has already transcended what recently has been a bearish market.

Major League Baseball executives for the most part have lost their infatuation with this market, discouraged by a string of disappointing results.

Yet, eight years after the New York Mets moved Jose Reyes to second base to clear a spot at short for Kaz Matsui, the Rangers opted for future with Darvish rather than making a run at free-agent slugger Prince Fielder.

The excitement over Darvish is understandable, because there aren’t many 25-year-old right-handers with his stature, repertoire and accomplishments.

The Rangers matched their enthusiasm with their bidding dollars, taking negotiating rights with a bid of $51,703,411 — topping the five-year-old record of $51.1 million by Boston for Daisuke Matsuzaka. Similarly, the value of Darvish’s contract will top Dice-K’s $52 million deal.

Such high-upside comparisons have become the exception. Only a few days ago, the New York Yankees declined to sign Hiroyuki Nakajima, after having earned negotiating rights with the shortstop considered a Matsui clone with a modest $2 million bid.

“Nakajima had about the same stats in Japan as Kazuo,” said Robert Whiting, an author and renowned expert on Japanese baseball and ballplayers. “Clear evidence that the love affair with Japan is over.”

This could be particularly true of position players, the last of whom to make a true impact was Hideki Matsui, whose debut season with the Yankees was nine years ago. Milwaukee is hoping that Norichika Aoki will be the next; the Brewers reached a two-year deal with the 30-year-old outfielder on Tuesday, two days before their own negotiating deadline.

However, mounting skepticism also relates to pitchers, who rode the first wave from Japan but have had little sustained success since Hideo Nomo.

Shortly before Darvish was posted in mid-December, in fact, the posting period for Hiroki Sanada ended with the Yokohama reliever becoming only the third player to not draw a single bid.

Pitchers, at least, have continued to show an upside, even if only in bursts. Matsuzaka was 33-15 in his first two Red Sox seasons, the same period during which lefty Hideki Okajima was a feared weapon in Boston’s bullpen. Although he didn’t make the move until he was 33, Hiroki Kuroda put in four solid seasons in the Dodgers rotation, with an overall 3.45 ERA in 114 starts, prior to signing with the Yankees as a free agent. Takashi Saito has relieved for four postseason teams in his six Major League seasons, working in a total of 322 games with an ERA never higher than 2.83.

Position players in the footsteps of Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui? Very little encouragement: None have hit higher than .268 (infielder Tadahito Iguchi and catcher Kenji Johjima). Very little power: Kosuke Fukudome hit 101 home runs in his last four seasons in Japan before getting a four-year, $48 million deal with the Cubs, and has totaled 42 homers in four Major League seasons.

“There used to be a feeling that if a guy was a superstar in Japan, he’ll be a superstar here. I don’t think you can say that anymore,” said Jim Duquette, now with MLB Network but eight years ago the Mets general manager who pursued and signed Kaz Matsui. “It’s become more a case of ‘buyer beware.’ We’ve seen the track record, and it hasn’t been great.”

The assimilation of Japanese ballplayers into Major League Baseball unfolded in steady, well-defined stages.

The pioneers were starting pitchers (with the historical exception of reliever Masanori Murakami of the 1964-65 Giants), led by Nomo, who joined the Dodgers in 1995. His 43 wins in his first three seasons included a no-hitter in the pitchers’ hell of Coors Field.

They were followed by setup relievers (Shigetoshi Hasegawa was an underrated weapon for the 1997-2001 Angels), then closers (Seattle’s Kazuhiro Sasaki, the 2000 American League Rookie of the Year who saved 119 games from 2000-02).

Next came small-ball outfielders (Ichiro in 2001 became the first regular), then sluggers (Hideki Matsui, a.k.a. Godzilla). Finally, middle infielders (Kaz Matsui), which is where the tide appeared to turn.

Kaz Matsui, who had been such a dynamic and exciting threat in Japan, forced Major League talent evaluators to begin taking a hard look at the factors that influence — or can prevent — crossover success.

The depth of the talent on big league teams is the biggest hurdle; it is a game without letup.

“You try to evaluate talent in Japan, but they don’t face the same caliber of pitching night in and night out,” said one Pacific Rim scout. “Pitching here is a lot deeper than it is in Japan. The top relief pitchers in Japan who come here become middle relievers.”

It is also a game with a different pace and mentality.

“Japanese baseball is not a very aggressive game,” Whiting pointed out. “You seldom see brushback pitches, or pitchers retaliating for hit batsmen, or basepath collisions. Japanese infielders seem intimidated by the tougher American game. [Kaz] Matsui seemed afraid of the inside fastball and the spikes-high slides of baserunners trying to break up the double play. Tsuyoshi Nishioka didn’t know how to handle the double play.”

Whiting was referring to the Gold Glove batting champion for whom the Twins paid $15 million a year ago, between the posting fee and a three-year contract. Nishioka batted .226 in 68 games — 120 points below his 2010 average for Chiba Lotte — but spent around two months on the disabled list with a fractured left leg, suffered when he couldn’t avoid a takeout slide by the Yankees’ Nick Swisher.

“It’s just a tough adjustment, all in all,” Whiting continued. “A player has to learn 30 different parks, different umpires, different strike zones. A batter has to learn 30 different pitching staffs. Pitchers have to learn 30 different batting orders.”

Competition shock is accompanied by culture shock, which cannot be minimized for players from such a tradition-bound country as Japan — which, not so incidentally, is also quite a bit smaller.

“I remember talking to Kaz about it,” Duquette said, “and he said the travel really wore on him. In Japan, you’re not on the road as much, you don’t do as much flying, with the crazy hours, as we do.”

“Different food, different language. A guy might have the physical ability and still be unable to make the mental adjustment,” Whiting cautioned. “You just never know how a guy will do in the Majors until he actually goes and tries to do it.”

That even goes for a beguiling prospect such as Darvish, on whom Major League talent mavens have kept a close watch for years. “He’s extremely talented,” said Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, “but in terms of how it transitions and everything else like that, it’s hard to say. I wouldn’t even want to speculate.” The Rangers are paying the price for finding out, confident that it will be money well spent.

via Major League clubs are more cautious with Japanese talent pool | MLB.com: News.

Orioles sign Taiwanese hurler Wei-Yin Chen to four-year deal

The Orioles have agreed to terms on a multiyear deal with left-hander Wei-Yin Chen, according to a baseball source. Chen is expected to take a physical before the signing becomes official.

Chen, 26, spent the last four years with the Chunichi Dragons of the Japan Central League. In those four years, Chen went 38-30 with a 2.48 ERA in 117 games (88 starts). This past season, Chen made 25 appearances for the Dragons and had a 2.68 ERA.

via Orioles sign Taiwanese hurler Wei-Yin Chen to four-year deal | orioles.com: News.

Major League Baseball: A History of the Posting System, and How to Fix It

As Major League Baseball fans currently await the terms of Yu Darvish‘s seemingly inevitable contract with the Texas Rangers—and to a lesser extent the contracts of Hiroyuki Nakajima and Norichika Aoki—the criticisms of the posting system agreed upon between Major League Baseball and Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball league arise once again.

Last year, the Oakland Athletics won the bidding for Japanese starting pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma with a bid of $19.1 million, however, contract negotiations broke down, Oakland was returned their money, and Iwakuma returned to the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. Off the bat, this raised controversy over the posting system’s failures, in that Iwakuma was unable to bring his talents to Major League Baseball due to differences over his potential salary with Oakland. This year, there were rumors swirling that the Toronto Blue Jays may have planned on outbidding everyone for Yu Darvish‘s rights, simply to block other teams from signing him for at least a year. While this didn’t happen, a lot of people in the baseball industry felt that a move like that, coupled with the failure to bring Iwakuma over, would cause the posting system to be looked at and changed.

Originally, the posting system had good intentions, and served a quality purpose. When some Japanese players—namely Hideo Nomo, Hideki Irabu, and Alfonso Soriano—exploited loopholes in their contracts to come play in the U.S., their Japanese clubs were left with nothing and frustrated, as they should have been. The posting system came into play, in which Major League Baseball teams have four days to place a one-time, confidential bid on a player posted, and the winner then receives thirty days of exclusive negotiations with the player. The Japanese club only sees the amount of the winning bid before deciding on whether to allow the bid or not. However, even with its faults, the posting system is a far superior option to the United States—Japanese Player Contract Agreement, which came into play in 1967, following the dispute between the San Fransisco Giants and Nankai Hawks over the rights to left-handed pitcher Masanori Murakami.

Masanori Murakami was sent over to the Giants’ A-ball affiliate in Fresno to learn the game, as something of an exchange student. Murakami excelled, and was eventually called up to the Giants in 1964 as a 20-year-old and became the first Japanese-born player to appear in a Major League Baseball game, having exceptional success as a reliever. Following the 1965 season, Murakami returned to Japan to fulfill his contractual obligations, despite the Giants desire to keep him on their roster. The United States—Japanese Player Contract Agreement came into play, which essentially meant that NPB players would stay in Japan, and MLB and minor leaguers would stay in North America. Eventually, the disparity between the two leagues became more and more obvious (NPB is considered roughly the equivalent of somewhere around AA or AAA baseball today), and in the 1990′s, Japan’s players wanted to come stateside and try their hand at the Majors. Hideo Nomo was the first, retiring from NPB after the 1994 season to come play for the Los Angeles Dodgers, signing a 3 year, $4.3 million contract. Nomo was able to come stateside due to the NPB’s reserve clause only being able to control his actions within Japanese baseball.

The second incident leading to the posting system was Hideki Irabu, who was to be traded from the Chiba Lotte Marines to the San Diego Padres, despite Irabu’s clearly desired intentions on only playing for the New York Yankees. After a lengthy series of debates, the Padres gave in after MLB sided with Irabu, who was traded to the Yankees, and promptly imploded, causing George Steinbrenner to make some not-so-flattering remarks about the portly pitcher. While the posting system is admittedly a fairer balance than the previous agreements and happenings, it’s still by far an imperfect system, one which should be addressed sooner rather than later.

via MLB: History of the posting system

Flashback, Hideo Nomo shuts out MLB batters and Barry Bonds,

Japanese shortstop Munenori Kawasaki to sign deal with Seattle Mariners

Free agent Japanese shortstop Munenori Kawasaki will sign a minor league contract with the Seattle Mariners with an invitation to spring training, the Seattle Times reported Thursday. “He and his wife are in Seattle this week, and sources say he will sign a minor-league contract with a spring-training invitation,” the newspaper said. “The signing might not be announced until after the holidays.”

The 30-year-old Kawasaki had earlier said in Japan that his ardent wish is to join his idol and mentor Ichiro Suzuki at the Mariners, adding he would even accept a minor league deal and be flexible about which position he plays. Kawasaki and Suzuki were twice teammates in the World Baseball Classic.

Kawasaki batted .267 with 161 hits and 31 steals in 144 games this past season for the Softbank Hawks, who won their first Japan Series championship since they were the Daiei Hawks in 2003.

via Baseball: Kawasaki to sign minor league deal with Seattle: report – The Mainichi Daily News.

Yakult Swallows accept $2.5 million bid on OF Norichika Aoki

The Yakult Swallows have accepted a $2.5 million posting fee for outfielder Norichika Aoki, Yasuko Yanagita of Hochi Shimbun tweets. Which team bid the $2.5 million on Aoki is not yet known. Whichever team it is will have 30 days to negotiate with Aoki, who will turn 30 next  month. The Mets, Nationals and A’s have all been rumored to be interested in Aoki.

The three-time Central League batting champion hit just .292/.358/.360 in 2011, but was a career .336/.411/.472 in his first seven years. He is one of just four players to collect 200 hits in a season in Japan, joining Ichiro Suzuki, ALex Ramirez and Matt Murton.

Aoki is a left-handed hitter, throwing right-handed. He won three Gold Gloves earlier in his career, but his throwing arm could limit him to left field in MLB. Aoki appeared for Japan in both World Baseball Classics, earning All-Tournament honors in 2009, when he played left and batted third for Japan.

via Swallows accept $2.5 million bid on OF Aoki – CBSSports.com.

Baltimore Orioles agree to terms with Japanese LHP Tsuyoshi Wada

The Orioles have agreed to terms with Japanese lefty starter Tsuyoshi Wada, which reopens their pipeline to Japan, according to an industry source. He will sign a two-year, $8.15 million deal with a 2014 option worth $5 million, the source said. It is the Orioles’ first foray into the Japanese market since signing Koji Uehara before the 2009 season.

Wada may not end up as the only pitcher from Japan’s Nippon Baseball League on the roster. The club is also seriously interested in Taiwanese lefty Chen Wei-Yin, who pitched for the Chunichi Dragons. It would be unprecedented if the Orioles could land both – and perhaps a bit of a long shot considering multiple major league teams have inquired about each pitcher.

The push into the Asian market comes on the heels of news out of Korea that South Korean submariner Chong Tae-Hyon will not be joining the Orioles and instead has signed a four-year, $3.1 million deal to stay in the Korean Baseball Organization. The Orioles had offered a two-year, $3.1 million deal and had Chong in for a physical.

Orioles executive vice president Dan Duquette never confirmed that Chong passed his physical, saying only that the veteran right-hander was weighing another option in Korea. 

The club’s attention, however, has turned to Japan and specifically Tsuyoshi Wada, who according to several sites will turn 31 in February. A soft-tossing strike thrower often compared to former Oriole Jamie Moyer, Wada pitched for Japan in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics and the country’s World Baseball Classic team in 2006 that won the inaugural title. Listed at 5 feet 10, 170 pounds, Wada consistently throws his fastball in the mid-to-high 80s, but he survives on a deceptive, three-quarters delivery and the ability to throw several pitches for strikes. He also misses bats, earning him the nickname “Dr. K of Tokyo” while in college. Throughout his career, he has maintained a 3-to-1 strikeout rate or better. Last year he was 16-5 with a 1.53 ERA in 184 2/3 innings with the Hawks. He struck out 168 batters and walked 40. He became a free agent in November and did not need to be posted.

Chen, 26, also did not need to be posted because, as a Taiwan native, his length of contract in the NPB was negotiated when he signed. His fastball reaches in the low-to-mid 90s. He was 8-10 with a 2.68 ERA in 24 starts with the Chunichi Dragons while battling injuries.

via Orioles agree to terms with Japanese LHP Tsuyoshi Wada – baltimoresun.com.

Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish reportedly wants to play Major League Baseball next season – ESPN

Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish wants to play Major League Baseball next season, USA Today reported Wednesday.

A 25-year-old right-hander Darvish plays for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, who would take bids from MLB teams to negotiate for their ace’s services. The money from the winning bid goes to the Fighters.

The team that wins the bidding has 30 days to negotiate a deal with Darvish. If a deal is not agreed upon, Darvish would go back to Japan and the money from the winning bid is returned.

Darvish has a 1.99 earned run average in Japan’s Pacific League since turning pro in 2005. He was 18-6 with a 1.44 ERA this season.

“He’s one of the best,” Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine, who managed against Darvish in Japan, told USA Today. “If you asked, ‘Who are the four best pitchers in baseball?’ you’d have to talk about him.”

via Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish reportedly wants to play Major League Baseball next season – ESPN.