The Pacific League’s SoftBank Hawks have signed pitcher Carter Stewart Jr. to a two-year contract extension worth as much as $10 million through 2026, Kyodo News reported Friday.
“He showed us a glimpse of the great stuff he possesses this season, and this contract represents our high expectations for him,” a team executive said Friday, according to Kyodo.
Stewart, the eighth overall pick in MLB’s 2018 draft, became a trailblazer as the first marquee American amateur to begin his pro baseball career in Japan in 2019, when he signed a six-year contract through 2024 estimated at $7 million.
As expected, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who I didn’t rate as one of the top five players in the Pacific League this year, won without any help from me, one of two voters who didn’t give him a single vote of any color for him.
The big surprise in Tuesday’s complicated Awards Night was that Shoki Murakami, collected not on the CL Rookie of the Year Award in a season during which he was never once referred to as a rookie “shinjinsenshu” by the Japanese media which only refers to first-year pros as rookie, but that the league ERA leader was also was selected MVP.
