This is not only one of the final installments of Prospect Week 2018, but also Sung Min Kim’s first piece as part of his February residency at FanGraphs. Sung Min is a staff writer for River Avenue Blues, the biggest independent New York Yankees blog on the web, and has freelanced for various publications including Deadspin, Sporting News, VICE Sports, the Washington Post, and more. He can also be found on Twitter. He’ll be contributing regularly here this month. Read the work of all our residents here.

While I’ve been an ardent follower of Major League Baseball since middle school, my interest in the sport increased considerably when I began following the Asian leagues closely. There are three popular leagues in East Asia: Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) based in Japan, Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) based in Korea, and the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) based in Taiwan. I was “born into” the KBO because of my Korean nationality. I slowly learned more about the NPB, though, as I grew up and Korean stars like Tae-Kyun Kim, Samson Lee, Seung-Yeop Lee, etc., headed there to play.

At around the time I was becoming more well acquainted with the particulars of the aforementioned leagues, major-league teams also began showing greater interest in Asian talent. Daisuke Matsuzaka‘s move to Boston was particularly significant to raising the profile of Asian baseball in the States. Yu Darvish and Masahiro Tanaka made their own splashes by bringing posting fees to their respective NPB teams and earning big contracts right out of Japan. Hyun-Jin Ryu’s move to the Dodgers was a landmark event, too, as it represented the first time ever that a Korean-born KBO player landed a big multi-year deal with a major-league club. More recently, of course, the entire Shohei Ohtani storyline — which ultimately landed the two-way star in Anaheim — has unfolded in very public fashion. There are more I’d mention but I’ll spare you for now.

It’s clear that more attention has shifted to the Asian leagues’ top players. There are clear major-league talents on the east side of the globe, and some of them — mostly the star-level types in each respective league — have decided to forego the comfort of their domestic leagues to challenge themselves in a whole new culture.

Some of those experiments have worked out, some have not. It is not easy to predict how a particular player will do in majors because there are so many factors to weigh. Skill is one thing. There are also cultural adjustments, too, and subtle differences to which players must adjust on the field. For instance, early in his MLB career, Hideki Matsui had difficulty dealing with the two-seam-heavy approach utilized by some pitchers. It is difficult to become adequate in all these aspects right away — especially for those players who are expected to start. Nonetheless, many Asian players dream of playing in the majors.

So, here, I present a list — accompanied by scouting reports — of six prospects playing in Asia. For this list, I considered only those players who (a) would be available to leave Asia within the next three years (or, before the start of the 2021 season) and who (b) have expressed interest in coming to the MLB or have, at least, not publicly refuted such a thing. Some players, like top NPB shortstop Hayato Sakamoto of the Yomiuri Giants (dubbed as the “Derek Jeter of Japan”), prefer to stay in Japan. Sakamoto has been ML scouts’ favorite for a while, but it’s possible that he just wants to stay and remain a star of Japan’s most popular team.

Yusei Kikuchi, LHP, Saitama Seibu Lions

Kikuchi is all but guaranteed to appear in the States by 2019. Not only does he features an arsenal that would easily make him a starter in the majors, but also he has strongly expressed desire to come over to the US. Back in 2009, as a top high-school pitching prospect for Hanamashi Higashi (the same high school attended by Shohei Ohtani attended), Kikuchi attracted much MLB interest. For instance, the Rangers recruited Derek Holland to try to persuade Kikuchi to sign with Texas. However, Kikuchi decided to stay in Japan and was drafted in first round by the Seibu Lions, for whom he has pitched ever since.

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