Sorry to be away from the blog for so long, but the past couple of weeks have been spent focusing on getting some hardware out of my left thigh. But it’s out, and things have been going on at a record pace.
Today, I want to nominate myself for the Jeff Passan Award for being a baseball writer being gloriously and over-the-top wrong, in my case about Masataka Yoshida’s chances of moving to MLB and the kind of opportunity he might find.
It’s contract season in Japan, when players and teams settle their official one-year deals for next season, which is part of the news cycle and typically when players who intend to be posted after next season tell the media they’ve asked the team to let them go to MLB.
Thursday we had the biggest contract news of the season, for the guy who had Japan’s biggest season in years.
We also had Japan’s first active player draft, in which every team was required to offer at least two players and take at least one. And, to some surprise, a couple of players with upside actually moved.
When you’re wrong, you’re wrong
I’ve loved Masataka Yoshida for years, with that powerful but compact swing, the raw power and tremendous plate discipline, but I was wrong about him have any chance of being posted, and then I was wrong about the kind of team he might land with in MLB and the kind of deal he might get.
As Passan did in his infamous assessment of Ohtani in the spring of 2018, that he looked like a high school hitter coming out of a league where no one throws curveballs, I canvassed a number of scouts to get their take on Yoshida’s prospects.
The upshot of it was, his defensive limitations and his lack of serious game power, his age, and the difficulties in adjusting to MLB pitching made it unlikely he would get a big deal. Some scouts do like him and believe that simple swing of his will allow him to adjust in the same way Norichika Aoki did.
A lot of scouts think the big hurdle will be whether he gets the playing time and reps he’ll need to adjust well, if he doesn’t produce quickly, and that a team intent on winning probably couldn’t just let him figure things out while playing below-average defense.
As a group, we all guessed some team might offer him $8 million to $10 million for three years. But that some team that saw more in him than anyone else might surprise us.
And we were surprised. Kiley McDaniel with ESPN, got much the same response I did before the signing.
Yoshida will turn 30 next year and his reported contract of five years for $90 million surpassed last year’s record $85 million five-year deal for a Japanese position player set by Seiya Suzuki and the Cubs.
Fenway Park eases the cost of playing him in left field, but the Red Sox only play half their games there. Yoshida plays an extremely high-percentage game and I see him as the kind of player who will be able to handle the non-baseball adjustments as well as anyone.
To add to the irony, his posting and signing went at light speed. It reminded me of when the Dodgers swooped in and scooped up Hideo Nomo so fast that Japan’s sports papers accused them of tampering.
The Buffaloes made Yoshida’s posting conditional on their signing a big free agent hitter, and they locked up Tomoya Mori a few days after he filed for free agency, something that pretty much never happens.
Then Yoshida reached an agreement with the Red Sox on the first day of his posting, and though agents are not supposed to begin negotiating until players are eligible to sign, teams were being told months ago by an agent, not necessarily Scott Boras, that he was coming.
Murakami-sama gets his due
Until Friday, the big news, cough, sputter, was Yuki Yanagita still being Japan’s highest paid position player, which as news goes, is about as objective as a news story declaring chocolate the best flavor of ice cream.
But today, we had 22-year-old Triple Crown winner Munetaka Murakami inking a three-year deal with the Yakult Swallows worth 1 billion yen ($7.3 million) that will make him eligible to be posted after the 2025 season, just before he turns 26 and able–under MLB’s current labor agreement–to be treated as an adult professional instead of an amateur as Shohei Ohtani was.
I don’t mean to diss on the Japanese media, but with few trades and little free agent activity, we are inundated with stories about EVERY player’s contract.
And because multiyear contracts are between players and teams, and NPB only officially deals with one-year contracts for the following season, news like Yanagita’s–that he signed a deal for 2023 the team was contractually obliged to offer him–are treated as news. I
Everybody knows Yanagita will sign because he has multiyear deal, but the media makes it an event anyway. On top of that, the claim that he’s the highest-paid Japanese position player is unverifiable, as teams and players leak figures to the media that they are comfortable with. Nobody really knows how much Murakami is getting except him and the team.
A new “kind of” draft
NPB held its first active player draft on Friday. Ostensibly, an opportunity for fringe major leaguers who are blocked from playing time with their current teams to get a better shot somewhere else.
NPB did not publish the players made available, just the 12 guys who were picked in Japanese pro ball’s version of a random Christmas Party gift exchange. There was no second round, as teams were obligated to take more than one player and no one did.
| Drafting team | Player | Age | Current team |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buffaloes | OF Daiki Watanabe | 25 | Swallows |
| Hawks | RHP Yuri Furukawa | 27 | Fighters |
| Lions | IF Naomasa Yokawa | 31 | Tigers |
| Eagles | OF Yuya Shozui | 26 | Carp |
| Marines | OF Seiichiro Oshita | 25 | Buffaloes |
| Swallows | LHP Kakeru Narita | 24 | Marines |
| BayStars | LHP Shotaro Kasahara | 27 | Dragons |
| Tigers | LHP Kotaro Otake | 27 | Hawks |
| Giants | OF Louis Okoye | 25 | Eagles |
| Carp | LHP Chiaki Tone | 30 | Giants |
| Dragons | OF Seiya Hosokawa | 24 | BayStars |
There was more potential there than I expected. Hosokawa has long torched the Eastern League, and Oshita is a tremendously fun player.
My wind chimes
I went to the hospital last week, when doctors removed a wind chime starter set that had been hiding in my left thigh, a leftover from a broken leg I suffered in 2017.
Everything went well. The doctor pulled out the hardware without damaging any of the surrounding muscle tissue, something which caused me months of painful rehab five years ago. So now it’s just about waiting for the scar to heal , for the bone to grow back into the holes vacated by my new toy, and to run out and get some thread to put my handicraft project together. I’m so going to do that.
