Thanks to all those who replied on twitter.com to the Central League and Pacific League award ballots I filed Sunday. The most frequent comment and one my wife echoed, was surprise over the omission of CL home run and RBI leader Kazuma Okamoto of the Giants.
Teruyo suggested I left Okamoto off my ballot because she liked him and I was being spiteful. I do have spiteful bones in my body, I’m afraid to say, but that wasn’t why Okamoto failed to make the cut.
Technically, Okamoto was available to be chosen to the CL Best Nine Team at third base, where he played 696 innings and 84 games, or first (492-1/3, 75) or outfield (39, 9). My personal choice as a cutoff for selecting a player at a position was that he play in at least half his team’s game there with 600 or more innings, but for the time being let’s say he was eligible at first as well.
The candidates competing with Okamoto at those positions were Toshiro Miyazaki of the DeNA BayStars and Yusuke Oyama of the Hanshin Tigers.
My estimates start with getting a run and home run adjustment for each team’s playing environment in 2023. Although the sum weight of all the Tigers’ parks tend to favor pitching and defense, they did not this year, and none of these three players’ parks appeared to have hugely distorted their offensive and defensive numbers.
Next come team wins. The idea, from Bill James, is to divide credit for the team’s actual wins among the teams’ players. By putting it on a team level, we can compare for important team defensive context such as the nature of their pitching staffs relative to the league, in terms of how many lefties threw and whether the pitchers tended to get ground balls or fly balls, or got lots of walks and strikeouts and give up lots of home runs or benefit from exceptional double play support.
I credited the Tigers’ batters with winning 40 games this season, the BayStars’ with 37 and the Giants’ with 39; and their fielders with winning, respectively, 14.2, 11.9 and 11.2. Then I compare the records of the players ON those teams with each other to figure out how many of those wins they should be credited with.
Here are players on their teams credited with winning at least one full game with their offense:
Hanshin: Oyama 8.2, Koji Chikamoto 7.4, Teruaki Sato 6.3, Takumu Nakano 5.3, Shota Morishita 2.7, Seiya Kinami 2.7, Sheldon Neuse 2.2, Dan Onodera 1.2.
DeNA: Shugo Maki 7.8, Miyazaki 7.6, Keita Sano 5.3, Taiki Sekine 3.5, Neftali Soto 3.0, Masayuki Kuwahara 2.8, Yasutaka Tobashira 1.1.
Yomiuri: Okamoto 8.0, Hayato Sakamoto 5.9, Takumi Oshiro 4.8, Yuto Akihiro 3.3, Yoshihiro Maru 3.1, Naoki Yoshikawa 2.8, Sho Nakata 2.1, Takayuki Kajitani 1.8, Lewis Brinson 1.7, Makoto Kadowaki 1.7, Hisayoshi Chono 1.6, Adam Walker 1.1.
If you look just at their offensive totals, Okamoto had the best season by far, and I suspect that will ensure he wins the best nine vote by an overwhelming total.
But if you look at what their teams did in terms of actual wins and losses, and you compare his contributions to his teammates’, and those of Oyama and Miyazaki to theirs, as I did, one can conclude that Okamoto’s eye-popping career year had less impact on his team’s wins than Oyama’s did on Hanshin’s and about the same as Miyazaki’s did with DeNA.
Oyama was a bigger part of a more successful offense than Okamoto was. Miyazaki, who was the lesser member of what was essentially a two-man offense in Yokohama, between him and second baseman Shugo Maki, was an even bigger part of a slightly less potent offense for DeNA.
While Okamoto’s total numbers far exceeded Miyazaki’s, if you look at what their teams accomplished, and their individual contributions to THAT accomplishment, Miyazaki’s contribution was very large indeed and nearly comparable to Okamoto’s.
That brings me to fielding, teams’ pitching and defensive wins are split based on “three true pitching outcomes,” home runs, strikeouts and walks, how often the team fielded batted balls and how well it turned ground balls into double plays. It’s defensive wins are further divided by comparing how each team did at each position relative to its league and context. Once the wins are divided by position, each player at that position shares based on their individual accomplishments.
Oyama is credited with nearly one full win for his play at first base, while 1.15 wins are attributed to Miyazaki’s play at third, while Okamoto’s total for third base, first base and the outfield comes out to about 0.7, and that put him behind Miyazaki for the Best Nine Award at third by my figurin’.
