All posts by Jim Allen

sports editor for a wire service in Tokyo

Yomiuri calls: Nine One Oh

For those of you who’ve been following this thread of research into called balls and strikes in NPB from 2009 to 2022, I’ve got a conclusion for you: The chance of the Yomiuri Giants, in the nine seasons from 2009 to 2017, doing as well as they did getting called strikes in 1-0 counts on talent alone is next to zero.

I started this investigation with the observation that the Giants pitchers got an abnormally high percentage of called strikes in some counts between 2009 and 2022. These results came from a data set received from ScoutDragon.com’s incomparable Michael Westbay.

Upon further investigation, it became clear that 2018 was a subtle watershed in NPB.

Since that point several teams diverged from their previous called-strike results relative to the other teams in their leagues. That year, 2018, was when 11 of the 12 teams, having successfully installed Trackman pitch-tracking systems, began sharing that data with NPB for the purposes of “umpire development.”

It would be overly cynical, even for me, to attribute much of the shift to umpires suddenly being just becoming slightly more diligent, since teams and players are always changing. Much of it was likely due to shifts in teams’ talent bases and approaches, while some of it was likely just random noise.

It was, however, obvious from the start that would have been impossible for an ordinary average team to achieve anything close to what Yomiuri did from 2009 to 2017.

Former ump Osamu Ino attributed the Giants’ extreme success in getting called strikes to the extreme high quality of their pitching staffs. When he said that, however, I had no way to measure how likely it would have been for a team that was nearly always the best in the league at getting called strikes on talent alone.

To see if Ino’s assertion was reasonable, I created a program that constructed normally distributed leagues. Of course, not all teams have equal access to talent, particularly since some, like SoftBank, are really good at developing it, or like Yomiuri, are really good at maintaining a system that increases their access to amateur talent at the expense of other clubs.

Still, if you take a collection of teams, throw them into a six-team league, their results in any area will be normally distributed. The model I eventually settled on assigns teams an annual chance of getting called strikes is based on their ability to actually get called strikes relative to the league from 2009 to 2017.

Continue reading Yomiuri calls: Nine One Oh

NPB news: June 10, 2023

Saturday saw a duel between a goldilocks impersonator and a golden oldie in a park where staying on base this weekend has been hazardous. Kazuma Okamoto keeps hitting home runs like a boss, as did Tomoya Mori, while Gosuke Kato had the last word in Hokkaido, and Katsuya Kakunaka’s revival helped snapped Hiroshima’s four-game win streak.

Saturday’s games

Swallows 2, Lions 0: At Seibu Dome, 43-year-old Masanori Ishikawa (2-3) shared Japan’s record for career interleague wins for less than 24 hours with 42-year-old Tsuyoshi Wada before reclaiming it with his 28th in an efficient 5-2/3 innings against Seibu, whose ace Kona Takahashi (4-4) allowed a run on four walks and five hits over seven innings.

“I did watch his game last night. It was great seeing another pitcher of the same generation perform like that,” Ishikawa said of Wada. “He was throwing some amazing pitches, so the two of us aren’t even comparable. But still, It was motivational.”

“There aren’t many of our generation still playing. Wada’s pitching inspired me.”

A day after three Lions runners were unceremoniously caught off base, portly Seib rookie Kento Watanabe must have been fooled into thinking he was fast after a stand-up double and was out easily trying to steal third, while Swallows catcher Yuhei Nakamura was picked off first.

Nakamura singled in the Swallows’ first run after a pair of fourth-inning walks set the table, and Tetsuto Yamada doubled in another in the ninth as Yakult snapped a three-game losing skid.

Continue reading NPB news: June 10, 2023