Tuesday was my season debut, at the ballpark with a roof that was formerly known as Prince.
Japanese are fond of reminding newcomers that Japan has four seasons, which is fine until we are confronted with the fifth, the early summer rainy season, when a few weeks of petty rain and damp in June and early July precede the typically brutal heat that Japan’s 2020 Olympic Bid Committee euphemistically described as “mild and sunny ” and “an ideal climate for athletes to perform their best.”
If five seasons, or even four, are too many for you, the Seibu Lions’ home stadium might be for you, with its two, deep freeze and steaming hot with just a few weeks of pleasant transition between the two each year. A longtime colleague for another website agreed, “Shitty cold and shitty hot.”
Here is a sample of what’s coming to jballallen.com. I am currently in the process of transforming the site’s data content to include user-searchable data tables for your reference, with much of it available only here.
The table below allows you to search for players career value for all players in Nippon Professional Baseball, including its predecessor the Japan Baseball League, as calculated using Bill James’ Win Shares.
For the uninitiated, three win shares is equivalent to one team win. The system has its detractors and has its shortcomings as does the more popular wins above replacement, but I’ll leave that for another space.
Win Shares’ flaws are largely artifacts created by the small sample sizes of fluke seasons and are mitigated to some degree when one is looking at careers.
As a teaser, here are the career value leaders for play within NPB by position:
Name
POS
B WS
F WS
P WS
CAREER
Masaichi Kaneda
P
16.9
0.0
509.5
526.5
Katsuya Nomua
C
468.9
138.4
0.0
607.3
Sadaharu Oh
1B
675.4
41.6
0.0
717.0
Shigeru Chiba*
2B
219.7
84.1
0.0
303.8
Shigeo Nagashima
3B
419.6
62.8
0.0
482.4
Hayato Sakamoto
SS
271.9
110.3
0.0
382.2
Isao Harimoto
OF
490.2
42.8
0.0
533.0
Kazuhiro Yamauchi
OF
385.8
61.7
0.0
447.5
Koji Yamamoto
OF
339.5
64.1
0.0
403.6
Hiromitsu Kadota
DH
412.2
28.8
0.0
440.8
*–The career value leader for players who spent most of their careers at second base is Kazuyoshi Tatsunami, with 315.2, followed by Hideto Asamura at 310.3, but neither played more than 1,300 games at second. I picked Chiba based on his overwhelming defensive superiority at second in his 1,415 games. Morimichi Takagi (294.6) was fourth overall despite playing over 2,000 games at second.
Of course, these valuations don’t reflect any part of the careers spent in America… For the full searchable table, read on.
