Tag Archives: Ichiro Suzuki

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Ichiro Suzuki, Akinori Iwamura & other NPB minor league stars

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Ichiro Suzuki is some day going to be the first player to begin his career in NPB and end up in MLB’s Hall of Fame. Akinori Iwamura won’t make it, but people familiar with his career in Japan know what a good ballplayer he was.

I recently re-added the minor league batting and pitching data from 1991 to 2001 to my data base — I lost my originals about 20 years ago in a hard disk crash — and asked which under-20 minor league hitter (minimum 200 PA) had the best seasons with offensive winning percentages over .700.

  1. Ichiro Suzuki (19.2 years old), Orix 1993, 214 PA, .883
  2. Akinori Iwamura (18.9), Yakult 1998, 430, .810
  3. Seiji Uebayashi (19.4), SoftBank 2015, 332, .799
  4. Akinori Iwamura (17.9), Yakult 1997, 297, .785
  5. Ichiro Suzuki (18.2 years old), Orix 1992, 270, .784
  6. Kensuke Kondo (19.4), Nippon Ham 2013, 227, .781
  7. Tomoya Mori (18.4), Seibu 2014, 257, .755
  8. Hisashi Takayama (19.1) Seibu 2001, 343, .708





Suzuki took a nice jump forward in 1993 and the next year took another when he won the first of his three straight PL MVP Awards. Most of the rest of the guys you know, although some of you may have forgotten Hisashi Takayama. He was an outfielder without outstanding speed or power and had one chance to play regularly at the age of 28 in 2010, when he played quite well, but was otherwise a guy on the fringe. Takayama’s minor league season at the age of 20 was the 10th best by a player aged 20-21 since 1991, so it’s fair to say Seibu REALLY missed the boat on him.

When Hisanobu Watanabe was promoted from farm manager in 2008, Takayama was one of the guys he gave a shot to in the spring, but at the age of 26 he needed an ally and didn’t have one. Then batting coach Hiromoto “Dave” Okubo, wasn’t a fan of Takayama’s and insisted on keeping hustling and likeable-but-underqualified Kenta Matsusaka as his right-handed-hitting platoon outfielder.

Uebayashi, who is mentioned here, is someone who lacks some plate discipline but who does everything else fairly well but has yet to break into SoftBank’s regular lineup. Had he played for Nippon Ham, however, like Kensuke Kondo, he’d no doubt have a job by now. Mori, it seems is caught in a crunch as well, he’s probably a better hitter than the other guys who are taking his playing time, but he needs to go out and prove.

The best minor league season for a player aged 20 was by Lotte’s Toshiaki Imae in 2004, a year before he became the Marines’ regular third baseman for a decade. At age 21, the best was by Ken Suzuki of the Seibu Lions in 1991. Suzuki went on to be a DH-third baseman for the Lions pennant-winning teams in ’97 and ’98 and a corner infielder with Yakult in 2001.







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Norihiro Nakamura & the Fab Four

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First a little question.

When Norihiro Nakamura announced his retirement on Tuesday, it left Ichiro Suzuki as the only active member of a very exclusive club. Any guesses as to what that group is?

Nakamura leaves after an intriguing career, drafted out of high school in 1991 by the Kintetsu Buffaloes, he left Japan for the U.S. in 2005 after Kintetsu evaporated in its merger with the Orix BlueWave. After a brief spell with the Los Angeles Dodgers, he returned to Japan — where Orix held his rights, but he was not a happy camper. Unable to sign him for 2006, Orix released him, but nobody it seemed wanted him.

The story is that in April 2005, Nakamura was hit by a pitch in interleague play by former big leaguer Masao Kida. Nakamura claimed he was forced to play through pain. He had a lousy season that ended when he was hit again and was capped with September surgery on the wrist where Kida had hit him in April.

Although he played in just 85 games, and batted just .232, Nakamura still managed 22 doubles and 12 homers but Orix, whose grasp of right and wrong at the time was extremely poor — just ask Hisashi Iwakuma — decided to use Nakamura’s poor results as an excuse to cut his salary by 60 percent to 80 million yen (roughly $800,000). Nakamura balked and was eventually released.

Eleven clubs — even those that had vacancies or issues at first or third that Nakamura might fill — showed no interest in even giving him a tryout. The exception was the club managed by Nippon Professional Baseball’s biggest iconoclast, Hiromitsu Ochiai, whose Chunichi Dragons gave Nakamura a tryout and signed him to an “ikusei” developmental contract. When Nakamura tore it up in the spring, he got a standard deal from the Dragons and at season’s end was the MVP of the Dragons’ first Japan Series championship since 1954.

His ikusei contract with the Dragons was for 4 million yen, and he was bumped up to 6 million yen upon receiving his standard contract. NPB rules require players on 28-man active rosters to be paid a pro-rated minimum of 10 million yen, so Nakamura ended up earning close to $100,000 in his first season with Chunichi.

Nakamura played another season for the Dragons, two more for Rakuten, and finished with 2,101 career hits after four seasons with the DeNA BayStars. Because of his longevity,  with 2,267 games and 404 career homers, he is a decent bet to make it into the Hall of Fame, perhaps in the same class with Atsunori Inaba of the Fighters, both of whom had somewhat longer careers than Tatsunori Hara, whose tenure on the players ballot just expired and who barely missed selection.

If Nakamura does make it in, and takes two or three years to get enough votes, there is a possibility that he will go into the Hall in the same class with Suzuki. With Tomoaki Kanemoto and Suzuki both locks as a future Hall of Famers, Nakamura’s induction would give the fourth round of Japan’s 1991 amateur draft three Hall of Famers. The one who won’t make it, although he will get some votes, and the reason I have referred to them as the Fab Four is former Hanshin Tigers outfielder Shinjiro Hiyama.