NPB news: June 11, 2023

Sunday was Roki Day, and I’m sad if you missed it, because while the final results were less than perfect, his pitching was – until the fifth inning when a few things went awry – as good as I’ve ever seen from him, and I’ve seen virtually every inning he’s thrown as a professional pitcher.

As he did last Sunday, when he outpitched Sasaki at Koshien, Hanshin’s Hiroto Saiki dealt more disappointment to another PL club, while DeNA became one of the few teams to solve Hiroya Miyagi. In Fukuoka, Tomoyuki Sugano made his season debut for the Giants after being sidelined all spring with fitness issues.

Sunday’s games

Marines 5, Carp 4: At Chiba Marine Stadium, Roki Sasaki (5-1)’s principle Achilles heel has been the command of both his fastball and splitter, and for four innings on Sunday, it was as good as it’s ever been. He attacked the zone with both those two big pitches and decent hop on his fastball, which has been another sore spot for him since May 2022.

For four innings, the Carp could not make anything resembling good contact off him, and that continued into the fifth, when he gave up a scratch infield single on a little bouncer for a leadoff runner. He then got dinged by umpire Takahiro Tsuchiyama, who followed custom and declined to call 0-2 strikes on the corner to the next two hitters, one of whom, Kosuke Tanaka, took a tough high fastball for a well-earned walk.

Matt Davidson got the barrel on a slider Sasaki had been tormenting him with for the first solid contact in play by a Carp hitter. It was Sasaki’s 33rd pitch of the inning, and he began muscling up to get out of the inning and began throwing pitches with less movement. Ryutaro Hatsuki was able to foul off four two-strike pitches, including one at 165 kph (102.5 mph) matching the fastest pitch recorded in Japan by a domestic pitcher, a record he shared with Shohei Ohtani. Hatsuke then smashed a straight fastball between third and short for a two-run single.

Sasaki got a four-run lead in the third on Koki Yamaguchi’s grand slam. Sasaki allowed two runs on five hits while striking out 10 and walking one and throwing 109 pitches. It was a game that very early could have turned into an historic performance but didn’t but damn he was good, doing what he did in last year’s perfect game, throwing his splitter in the zone when he wanted to and locating his fastball.

Continue reading NPB news: June 11, 2023

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

writing & research on Japanese baseball

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