Tag Archives: Nobuhiro Matsuda

Baseball, Free, News

NPB news: Sept. 28, 2023

Leave a comment

On Thursday, the Central League’s contenders and pretenders had the day off to reflect on their sins, while two teams with PL postseason aspirations, the Lotte Marines and Rakuten Eagles were in action against teams with nothing to lose. The Marines sent strikeout machine Atsuki Taneichi against the Fighters in Hokkaido, where he went into battle essentially unarmed. Taneichi entered the game trailing Yoshinobu Yamamoto by five, 158-153 and his 10.35 strikeouts per nine innings is second only to teammate Roki Sasaki‘s 13.35.

Late on Wednesday night, we learned 40-year-old Nobuhiro Matsuda will wrap up his career at season’s end having played 11 games so far for the Yomiuri Giants after 17 for the SoftBank Hawks, who made him a premium pre-draft signing out of Asia University in 2005.

A day after Lotte failed to deactivate a player for COVID, they were back on board that train, deactivating Taiga Hirasawa. On a positive note, Hiromi Oka and Takashi Ogino returned from brief COVID deactivations.

Thursday’s games

Marines 9, Fighters 2: At Kitahiroshima Taxpayers Burden Field, Atsuki Taneichi faced Nippon Ham without his best pitch, and without having to be on the lookout for that splitter, the Fighters batters beat the daylights out of him. While Haruka Nemoto (3-0) struck out seven while allowing a run over six innings in his best start of the season, Nemoto threw three splitters in the early innings and then they disappeared.

With two outs and none on in the fourth:

  • Taiki Narama lashed a first-pitch hanging two-seamer for a single
  • Yua Tamaya put a good swing on a 1-0 slider away and pulled it on the ground past first.
  • Another good slider, 3-2 away, and Chusei Mannami got enough on it to get it past short.
  • A hanging 2-2 slider away, and Ryohei Hosokawa poked it between third and short.
  • Kotaro Kiyomiya put a good swing on a good 1-2 fastball low in the zone and drilled it over second.
  • A 3-0 fastball down the pipe and Ariel Martinez doesn’t try to do too much with it, just lashes it to left. It’s 7-1 Fighters and Taneichi’s gone and the game’s over.

Taneichi recorded four strikeouts, leaving him one back of Yamamoto, who can now cruise to his third straight PL strikeout title.

Eagles 9, Buffaloes 5: At Miyagi Stadium, Rakuten twice came from behind to move from fourth place to third, a half-game ahead of Lotte with much of the heavy lifting done by reliever Seiryu Uchi, who came in the third for Rakuten and faced nine batters over three innings, to give the Eagles space to catch up.

Tomoya Noguchi‘s three-run second-inning homer put the Buffaloes in the driver’s seat in Sendai, but Kohei Azuma, who was solid in his previous four starts, surrendered four runs over five innings. Daichi Suzuki hit a solo homer for the Eagles in the bottom of the second. Hideto Asamura tied it with an RBI single to cap a two-run third-inning rally.

Hiroto Kobukata who’d reached base his first two times but been forced out, walked with one out in the fifth and scored the go-ahead run on a Yuya Ogo double before the Buffaloes came from behind. Marwin Gonzalez‘s two-out sixth-inning single tied it but Ogo threw a runner out at the plate to end the inning. Shuhei Fukuda, who’d made the out at the plate, made up for that by singling in the go-ahead run in the seventh.

Orix’s Shota Abe, in to protect a one-run eighth-inning lead, instead got hammered, allowing five runners to reach, all of whom scored, with both of his outs coming on sac flies.

Matsuda to hang ’em up

Nobuhiro Matsuda is a guy who belongs on a baseball field. For 18 years, he’s embodied the game, as an energetic and dynamic leader. He won eight Pacific League Golden Glove Awards at third base, and surprisingly for a guy who hit 301 career home runs, just one Best Nine – because in many of his better seasons he had the misfortune of playing the same position as six-time PL home run champ Takeya Nakamura.

Matsuda was a distinctive figure. Unafraid to be flamboyant, he would shout at the top of his lungs in practice when doing toss batting, and would hop on one foot when he swung and missed at a pitch.

He had a chance to play in MLB as a utility player, only to have a lawyer friend of his wife’s poison his MLB agent’s negotiations by talking with the San Diego Padres’ people in Fukuoka, and then representing Matsuda in his huge multiyear deal in December 2015 to remain with the Hawks. It has been a ton of fun watching him play baseball.

Baseball, Commentary, Free, News

Sugano’s decision

Leave a comment

Yomiuri Giants ace Tomoyuki Sugano will be back in Japan for 2021, and though he probably is not the best pitcher in Japan right now as some in the U.S. media have labeled him in the crush for hyperbola, he’s not far from the best.

I speculated on some of the reasons why a Japanese star should not just leap into a major league deal, and Sugano himself cited the direction MLB is going during the coronavirus pandemic.

On Sunday, Japan got a bit of perspective.

“It wasn’t something I could be 100 percent satisfied,” Sugano told Japan’s media.

His agent, Joel Wolfe, had a media availability, a portion of which was aired on TV in Japan and that clip was then shared on Twitter.

  • Wolfe: “It was very tough.”
  • —How many teams made a clear offer?
  • Wolfe: “Six. He had several four-year offers, three-year offers and two-year offers.. Our expectation and his expectation what a fair contract was a bit different. And I ended up having to call that general manager with two minutes to go. “
  • Wolfe: “He was able to draw on his relationships with (Yu) Darvish and (Kenta) Maeda. They all offered so much assistance and advice. I don’t think he will ever regret…”
  • Wolfe: “I think the major league teams are really going to regret…”

Although Wolfe implied money kept the two sides apart, it could well be that the money offered was not enough to outweigh Sugano’s concerns about playing in the States now.

Waseda University manager Satoru Komiyama, for years the workhorse of the Lotte Marines rotation, and briefly a New York Met, threw in his two cents. In a Facebook comment, he said considerations of money shouldn’t matter if one really desires to work from a major league mound. He suggested that agents, not players, were the ones who made a big deal about contract value.

Here’s a Kyodo News‘ 2019 interview with Komiyama

When veteran Japanese stars take pay cuts to play in the majors, or who turn their back on minor-league deals to return to lucrative contracts with their old teams in Japan, there are questions.

I have questioned the quick U-turns of Takashi Toritani, Nobuhiro Matsuda and Ryosuke Kikuchi. Each espoused a great desire to play abroad, but at the same time prioritized a happy exit from their Japanese clubs. None of them would negotiate past a certain date, they said, because that would leave their clubs back home in a bind about whether or not they would be available for the upcoming season.

To be sure, Matsuda’s case was unusual. A Japanese attorney negotiating his next contract with the Hawks complicated his American agent’s negotiations by talking directly to the San Diego Padres’ people on the ground in Fukuoka.

Every deal, however, is unique in its way because every player has different concerns for his career, for his life off the field and for his family. It’s probably never JUST about money.

Sugano really wanted to play in the majors. Either that or he’s been really good at making people think that for years.

On Sunday, SoftBank Hawks chairman Sadaharu Oh, who would have given some part of his anatomy for a chance to play in the majors when he was young, told TBS network’s Sunday Morning, “He absolutely wanted to go.”

“I believe he wanted to see how well his pitching skill would play in America.”

Sugano has reportedly received a four-year offer from Yomiuri with annual opt-outs allowing him to go a year from now if he likes, although he could also sign a one-year deal and file for international free agency if he can compile the necessary service time.

“Is next year the best chance for him given his age? I think so,” Oh said. “But I think he really wanted to do it now.”