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Baseball, History, Paid Content, Research

Where second base and the outfield converge

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Yamato Maeda played his 16th game of the season at second base on Sunday  as he continues to fill in for Hiroki Uemoto. Maeda, who won his first Golden Glove Award last season for his work in center field, has played 75 games in the outfield this season, earned his first playing time in the Central League as a utility infielder (playing primarily at second).

But there is nothing new or unusual about a star center fielder playing second in Japan. A number of players have shifted back and forth between second and the outfield, mostly center and right. The champion of the second baseman-center fielders is Keiichi Hirano of the Orix Buffaloes, who had seven seasons in which he played a minimum of 35 games at second base and the outfield. Hirano first accomplished this in 2004, when the infielder was asked to play in the outfield as well. He shuttled back and forth a bit until current New York Mets manager Terry Collins took over the Buffaloes in 2007 and planted Hirano at second.

Collins returned for his second season to find Orix had traded Hirano, the club’s fastest player, for aging and often-injured Tigers slugger Osamu Hamanaka. Down the road at Koshien, Hirano became the Tigers’ center fielder-second baseman of choice for five straight years before he returned to Orix as a free agent in 2013 and continued to divide his defensive duties.

Next on the list after Hirano, is the late Takuya Kimura, who after his trade to the Hiroshima Carp, inherited the outfield-second base role that current Carp skipper Koichi Ogata vacated when he was made a full-time outfielder. KImura shuttled back and forth for five seasons. If all this is confusing, just think that while Ogata was shuffling around with the Carp, the Yomiuri Giants also had  second baseman-center fielder, and also named Koichi Ogata, who was a frequent contributor at both positions from 1990 to 1994.

The other name pair among the double-duty men are the Tomashino brothers, Seiji of the Seibu Lions and his younger brother Kenji of the Yakult Swallows.

The table below shows the guys who had multiple seasons in which they played 20-plus games at second base and in the outfield. Notice that this started in the ’70s with John Sipin and HIrokazu Kato, it was primarily a ’90s thing.

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Baseball, Paid Content, Research

Japan’s bunt paradox part 2

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Kenta Imamiya of the Hawks bunts with no outs in the top of the first inning against the Buffaloes.

In a previous rant and observation about Japan’s ubiquitous first-inning sacrifice bunts, I noticed that teams in Nippon Professional Baseball that bunt in the first innings of scoreless games gain no advantage in how often they put at least one run on the board AND score fewer overall runs, BUT win games more often.

Those results, based on the first innings of the 2,592 regular season games played between 2012 and 2014, looked suspicious, so I increased the study to include the games played from 2007 and 2011.  Of the eight years in the study, in only three of them did visitors win more often when trying to bunt the leadoff man to second in the first inning. The three years were 2007, 2013 and 2014–three of the lower-scoring seasons in the study.

NPB introduced a uniform, less-lively ball in 2011. Since then, scoring has decreased sharply. With that decrease, the cost of the first-inning sacrifice has decreased. Since the switch, visiting teams can expect to score .79 runs per inning when the leadoff man is not sacrificed to second. That is a decrease of .11 runs per inning in the same situations before 2011, while the number of runs expected per inning after a sacrifice has remained nearly constant (dropping from .69 to .68.

The strangest thing about bunting in the first inning–and almost half the time the leadoff man is on first in NPB a successful sacrifice follows–is that the chance of scoring one or more runs in the first inning after the leadoff man reaches first is NOT effected by a sacrifice. The NPB data show a slight advantage to sacrificing after the 5th through 8th hitters are on first base with no outs but no appreciable difference in the first inning with the team’s best hitters coming to the plate.

With current low levels of offense, bunting the leadoff man to second base in the top of the first is costing Japanese teams a 10th of a run per sacrifice — yet despite giving away outs and runs, the visitors employing this strategy are now making out like bandits: winning their games at a .513 clip compared to the .459 winning percentage of visiting clubs that “fail” to sacrifice the leadoff man to second.

One person suggested on Twitter that sacrifice bunts lead to more wins BECAUSE teams sacrifice more often with their best starting pitchers on the mound. A quick look shows there is something to this. From 2007 to 2014, Japanese visiting teams with a big winner on the mound (12 wins or more that season) will sacrifice the leadoff man to second in 54 percent of their opportunities. The percentage with lesser pitchers on the mound is 47 percent.

This bias remained more or less constant from 2007 to 2014, but somehow didn’t help visiting teams before 2011. Before 2011, visitors that sacrificed the leadoff man to second base in the first inning went 204-253 (.446), while teams that did not bunt the runner over went 255-265 (.490). 

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