The Yomiuri Giants introduced Justin Smoak and Eric Thames on Tuesday, and we’re all pretty interested to see how they adapt to Japanese baseball.

I’m not going to try and project any numbers for them since the subtle differences hear pose different challenges to the ones they faced back home. It’s not merely a case of facing fewer MLB-caliber pitchers, but adjusting to the way they are pitched, not to mention all the cultural speed bumps that come at you.

But what if we assume these two 34-year-olds produce in Japan close to their MLB career norms? Thames had basically two MLB careers, one before he played in South Korea’s KBO, and one after. For him, we’ll use his time since he returned.

Here are the MLB slash lines I’ll use to find NPB comps:

• Smoak: .229/.322/.419
• Thames: .237/.339/.486

Now we find the players who played a full season in NPB from 2013, when the current ball was introduced, and 2019 whose, average, OBP and slug were similar.

What hitters had full seasons comparable to their career slash lines:

Smoak’s group is: Lastings Milledge 2013, Ryota Arai 2013, Shinnosuke Abe 2014, Hisayoshi Chono 2015, Sho Nakata 2016, Masahiro Nakatani 2017, Takayuki Kajitani 2017, Japhet Amador 2017, Zelous Wheeler 2019.

Thames’ group is: Wily Mo Pena 2014; Alfredo Despaigne 2015, 2018; Ernesto Mejia 2016; Garrett Jones 2016; Nobuhiro Matsuda 2016, 2018; Wladimir Balentien 2017; Munetaka Murakami 2019; Seiya Inoue 2019; Brandon Laird 2019.

Over 143 game seasons, their groups averaged:

• Smoak: 125 games, 55 runs, 20 home runs, 68 RBIs and 45 walks
• Thames: 131 games, 64 runs, 29 home runs, 81 RBIs and 57 walks

This doesn’t mean they WILL approach these numbers, but just one way of looking at one of any number of possible outcomes. All the guys in both comp groups were productive regulars, but if the Giants were expecting two 34-year-olds to come in and each hit 40 home runs over 143 games, they’re likely to be disappointed.