On Saturday, John E. Gibson (@JBWPodcast), Claudio Rodriguez (@beisboljapones), Christian Gin (@Christian_Gin) got together on Zoom to discuss our Pacific League picks for the upcoming season for the upcoming Japan Baseball Weekly Podcast.
I don’t want to give away any spoilers before the show drops on Monday, but we were unanimous in our pick for the 2022 PL champion.
The big controversy, it turned out was how to treat a SoftBank Hawks team that “struggled” so abysmally, that they led the league in the fewest runs allowed but missed leading the PL in runs scored by 20 and finished fourth.
The resulting discussion reminded me of those surrounding the projections for the Lotte Marines in 1996.
For about 15 years, Lotte had been nearly as bad as the PL’s weakest team of that era, the Nankai Hawks. But in 1995, under a new manager, Bobby Valentine, the Marines challenged for the PL pennant before fading in the final few weeks.
Valentine was fired by his boss, then GM Tatsuro Hirooka, ostensibly because his incompetence cost the Marines a pennant they should have won easily. This is reminiscent of the media campaign to oust BayStars manager Alex Ramirez in the 2020 season.
Even with Valentine back in the States in 1996 as the manager of Triple-A Norfolk, everybody and their cousin had the Marines taking the next step in 1996 because “Valentine taught them how to win.”
The Marines did play remarkably well down the stretch after a poor start and bettered their Pythagorean Win projection by three games in 1995, not a huge number, but suggests things went their way in a way that might not be sustainable. Teams that overshoot their Pythagorean projections tend to decline the following season.
The Hawks are the other side of that coin. They failed to match their Pythagorean projection by nine games, a fairly substantial amount.
There’s no hard explanation for this, but when people get together to evaluate teams, we have to say something, and so someone will naturally attach meaning to teams’ winning or not winning as evidence of SOMETHING.
In the case of the 1995 Marines, the reason for the additional wins, for many, was that the Marines had become “winners.” For the Hawks, no doubt, many will attribute their failure to win the league to their “NOT being winners.”
For the Hawks there definitely was a reason beyond that, a bullpen black hole that swallowed up their three first-choice late-inning relievers, Yuito Mori, Livan Moinelo, and Sho Iwasaki. The three combined for just 31 saves, two fewer than in the shortened 120-game 2020 season.
The Hawks were 11th in saves, with only the BayStars recording fewer, and there is a small but perceptible effect of having a reliable bullpen that delivers lots of saves.
Teams since 1990 that saved 40 or more games outperformed their Pythagorean projections by an average of 1.39 games. Teams that saved fewer than 30 underperformed their projections by 1.57 games.
I won’t spill my picks until the show drops, but I’ll tell you this. From 1938 to 2019, and skipping 1943 and ’44 because of the effect of the war, four fourth-place teams have missed their Pythagorean projections by at least nine games.
The first three of these “non-winners”, the 1981 Seibu Lions, the 2000 Yakult Swallows, and the 2013 Hawks all won championships the next year and the Japan Series.
Sports require toughness, the mental strength to persevere and shrug off failure, and confidence in your ability. So I’m not going to trash the idea that willpower is important, but that it’s much harder to put together a team that outscores, outpitches and outfields the league — in an off-year.
The Hawks’ offense was Japan’s second oldest last season, behind the Chunichi Dragons, so perhaps it’s not time to get too big of a head SoftBank skipper Hiroshi Fujimoto’s chance of snatching the PL pennant in his first rodeo.
