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On Tuesday, Japan had a weird trade and its first free agent signing of the autumn.

Weird trade

The Chunichi Dragons, who had the worst offense in Japan for each of the past two years as measured by offensive win shares, traded one of their better players from the past four years, second baseman Toshiki Abe, to the Rakuten Eagles for former ace pitcher Hideaki Wakui, who has had one good season in the past five.

This is a weird trade for two reasons, although not for the Eagles.

The Eagles get a 33-year-old (from December) who can play second or third, and even better, bats right-handed on a largely left-handed-hitting team, while giving up a 36-year-old who is occasionally really good but has a million miles on his arm.

The Dragons, who have one of Japan’s better pitching staffs will get a pitcher they probably will have no role for, so it makes no sense, except that the Dragons do so many things that make no obvious sense that it is fairly on-brand.

The other reason it’s weird is because both of these players have some established value. The rule in Japan is: never trade a player you think has the chance to be good for the other team, because that will be perceived as a mistake.

It’s so weird that one has to think there was a reason Abe had to leave Nagoya. My first guess is that it has to do with family, because he’s from a town in Iwate Prefecture, about 70 kilometers from Sendai.

Eagles manager Kazuhisa Ishii said the trade was initiated by the Dragons, so that’s as good a guess as any.

Seibu loses another free agent

Tomoya Mori added to the list of stars who have fled the domed stadium formerly known as Prince, but unlike their former ace Takayuki Kishi and their former all-star second baseman Hideto Asamura, Mori, the PL’s top catcher opted not for the Rakuten Eagles but to return home to Osaka, where he signed a four-year deal to play for the Orix Buffaloes.

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Do some teams get more favorable strike calls than others? Do the Yomiuri Giants, who have a long organizational history of writing the official rules to favor their business model, and then bending or ignoring those rules when it suits them, get the same kind of favoritism on the field?

A legion of anti-Giants fans want to believe Yomiuri catches the bulk of the breaks, and there are tons of examples where the Giants did get obviously favorable calls, but focusing on individual calls without a broader context leads to little clarity.

So I did a study of how often pitches taken are called balls, and how that differed from team to team and from batters to pitchers. Without pitch-tracking data, it’s difficult to compile objective league-wide contexts, but we do have the record of pitches that require an umpire’s judgement to call a ball or a strike.

While there will obviously be noise in such a rough sample, the study supports two conclusions: that some teams have routinely tended to get better calls than others, and that batters are responsible for the largest amount of variability in the results of plate appearances.

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writing & research on Japanese baseball

jballallen.com

NPB news: Nov. 15, 2022

Weird trade

Seibu loses another free agent

Getting the calls

writing & research on Japanese baseball