Yoshinobu Yamamoto is on the market and his agent had things to say about that, while the biggest fish in a small Japanese free agency pond has signed.
Orix hits pay free agent pay dirt again
The Orix Buffaloes signed this winter’s top free agent, Hiroshima Carp outfielder Ryoma Nishikawa, who didn’t put up the best numbers of his career, but who has been a consistently valuable regular for the past five seasons.
His contract is reported as being four years for 1.2 billion yen, basically a 300 percent raise over what he was earning in Hiroshima. And as for whether players feel one league might be better than the other, Kyodo News quoted him as saying he was interested to see how well his game played in the PL.
He’ll be 29 on Dec. 10, and he’s coming off the most valuable season of his career by Bill James’ Win Shares, but the worst of his six seasons as a regular by Delta Graphs’ WAR.
His 18.6 win shares would have been fourth most among Buffaloes’ position players, and fifth most if one included pitchers. Win Shares ranked him at one win more than shortstop Kotaro Kurebayashi, while WAR has Kurebayashi 0.9 wins above Nishikawa. That’s the way it goes.
It’s the second year the Buffaloes got one of the top picks of the free agent crop by signing Tomoya Mori, who turned in the team’s most valuable season.
Agent Wolfe: Market for Yamamoto starts hot
Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s agent, Joel Wolfe, said he’s never seen a market for a free agent start so hot so quickly after receiving numerous e-mails and calls from teams on the first day they were allowed to negotiate.
In addition to the usual hyperbole about a player who barely needs it, Wolfe explained the market the same way others have spelled it out for me this autumn, that the demand for quality starting pitchers is reaching panic proportions and the metrics available through tracking data gleaned from NPB games has made MLB front offices think they know everything about Yamamoto’s pitching.
Of course, I wanted to jump in and say throwing an NPB ball and an MLB ball are different experiences and require adjustments, but there is no doubt that Yamamoto has the raw ability to make those tweaks.
Mix in that he’s 25, and a few months older than Masahiro Tanaka when the Yankees signed him to MLB’s biggest first-year player contract, throw in inflation and you get a deal that could go beyond $200 in my way of thinking.
Wolfe did say that one of the teams that have contacted him might drop out of the Yamamoto sweepstakes if they land Shohei Ohtani, and that Yamamoto will not be at the winter meetings starting Dec. 3 in Nashville, Tennessee, but intends to meet teams after that.
I’ll have more stuff on Yamamoto and Wolfe and some other things in the next newsletter.
