As expected, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who I didn’t rate as one of the top five players in the Pacific League this year, won without any help from me, one of two voters who didn’t give him a single vote of any color for him.
The big surprise in Tuesday’s complicated Awards Night was that Shoki Murakami, collected not on the CL Rookie of the Year Award in a season during which he was never once referred to as a rookie “shinjinsenshu” by the Japanese media which only refers to first-year pros as rookie, but that the league ERA leader was also was selected MVP.
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.
