Last week, I asked you for questions regarding Japanese & Asian baseball. There were more replies than I expected, so I’m going to have to split my responses into two or three posts. So let’s get started with part 1.

Ed says: January 22, 2010 at 1:01 pm

I’d be interested in how often pitcher arm injuries happen in Japan/Asia versus how often they do in MLB/MiLB. On that subject, what the average pitch speeds are as well in comparison.

My casual observation is that there are more Mark Prior-style, one-year wonder flameouts in Japan than in MLB. Without giving it too much thought, I can come up with Kazumi Saito, Futoshi Yamabe, Kenjiro Kawasaki, Shinji Imanaka, Tomohiro Kuroki… each of whom had one or two outstanding seasons before succumbing to injuries. Imanaka, who threw 249 innings of 2.20 ball at age 22 and his last pitch at age 30, recently said in the news that “rest is important”.

On velocity, there are fewer pitchers in NPB who throw 95+ mph than there are in MLB. You can get a sense for what pitchers throw and how hard at my NPB Tracker Data site. It doesn’t compare to the pitch f/x data we have on Fangraphs, but it will give you a sense of how NPB pitchers mix it up.

mymrbig says: January 22, 2010 at 1:04 pm

I’ve read that baseball used in Japan are a slightly different size than those in the US. Does this pose much of a problem for pitchers moving either way, or is the difference small enough that it doesn’t really matter?

Did you realize that early-90s hair metal stragglers Mr. Big enjoyed quite a following in Japan? Anyway, commenter KaminaAyato provided a solid answer for this question in the comments of the previous post, but I will add that I do think it makes a difference for some pitchers. Daisuke Matsuzaka’s forkball hasn’t survived the move across the Pacific, Yu Darvish had trouble throwing his curve with the WBC ball, and Kenshin Kawakami said he spent more time working on his breaking pitches early in spring training in 2009 than he would have previously. But then again, guys like Hiroki Kuroda and Takashi Saito have seemed to adjust just fine. Keiichi Yabu seemed about the same in the US and Japan too.

The Frankman says: January 22, 2010 at 1:13 pm

How big is the impact of the different strike zones is it for a pitcher coming from Japan? I’m wondering since guys like Ryota Igarashi will have to deal with it.

Chris says: January 22, 2010 at 1:55 pm

Yeah, I would like to hear this one. I always hear that the strike zones are bigger in Asian baseball — any truth to that?

My (unofficial) translation of the official rule is “the strike zone’s upper limit is the point mid-way between the batter’s shoulders and the top of his pants, the lower limit is the bottom of the batter’s knees, and covers the area over homeplate”. So that’s not too far off the MLB strike zone. In practice, I have noticed that the umpires can get a little generous at times, the most obvious example that comes to mind being that Koji Uehara always seemed to get the close calls.

MetsFan says: January 22, 2010 at 1:12 pm

Is there some sort of MLE for pitchers, or certain statistics that are more predictive than others of MLB performance? For hitters, it seems like it might be harder to do because of how power translates

There were a couple of questions on this, so I’ll point out Jim Albright’s work in this area again.

Jon says: January 22, 2010 at 1:16 pm

Thanks for doing this! I’m intrigued.

1) What is the average $(or yen)/WAR in Japanese baseball? Significantly lower than MLB I assume, but do you have any data?

2) I’ve heard pitchers are used differently in Japan (tactically, that is). Pitch Counts? Side sessions? Bullpens? 5 man rotations? What’s the story?

3) Is Japan typically a lower run scoring environment than MLB? If so, is that due to different offensive strategies (sacrifices, “small ball”, etc.)?

4) Is there pitchfx data in Japan?

I have more, but that’ll do for now.

Thank again!

I already posted a reply to this, but I’ve given question #1 a little more thought. The problem is the “R” out of WAR — I don’t think anyone has translated the concept of replacement player to NPB. If the expected performance of a replacement-level NPB player could be nailed down it should be possible to apply the rest of the concept to NPB. Another approach would be to look at the foreign players who move to NPB each season, what their MLB projections are and how much they make in Japan. Projected MLB WAR isn’t necessarily a good predictor of NPB performance, but it might give some insight into how much NPB teams pay to import talent.

That’s all for this round. If I didn’t get to your question this time, I will in an upcoming installment.

Edit, Friday night: Thanks everyone for your questions. There are more questions here than I anticipated getting, and many of them tread similar ground, so I’ll answer anything I couldn’t get to today in my next post.

Being FanGraphs’ new resident Japanese baseball guy, I’d like to get a better sense of what this audience wants to know about that aspect of the game.

So, if you have any questions about Japanese or Asian baseball, leave ’em in the comments.

I will make my best effort to answer all (serious) questions. I’ll check back periodically throughout the day, and answer whatever I can off the top of my head immediately. Questions requiring more research will be answered in a later post.

Okay, enough of the ground rules, fire away!

For whatever reason, John Sickels’ final sentence of his prospect retro for Brooks Kieschnick has stuck with me since I first read it: “In an alternate universe somewhere, the Cubs let [Kieschnick] play in ’96 and ’97 and he ended up having a decent career.”

I suppose you could make a similar statement about a number of players. One of them is Tuffy Rhodes, who got a longer look from the Cubs than Kieschnick did, but wound up spending most of his career in the alternate universe of the Rising Sun.

Rhodes is in the Japanese news a bit as he doesn’t have an employer for 2010. His team for the last three years, Orix, offered him a substantial pay cut for 2010, and has reportedly been waiting two months to hear back from him. I don’t blame Rhodes for having a bad taste in his mouth; despite missing about 60 games in 2009 he still hit 22 home runs with a .308/.402/.583 slash line. I don’t buy it, but there is some speculation that he could call it a career.

If this is the end of the line for Rhodes, has he done enough to get into the NPB Hall of Fame? Conventional wisdom says yes. It’s tempting to compare Rhodes to other foreign-born NPB hitters, but his numbers hold up against the top Japanese sluggers. Forgive the lack of advanced metrics here, but Rhodes is 12th all time in home runs (464), 23rd in runs (1100), 54th in hits (1792), 16th in RBI (1269), 16th in walks (958), 22nd in total bases (3509), and 4th in slg pct (.559). Most of the players that are ahead of Rhodes in the power categories have put up their numbers in 20+ seasons; Rhodes has played 13 so far in Japan, and another productive season would move him a couple of notches up the chart in each category.

But the rub is that the Japanese universe Hall of Fame is tougher to get into than its American counterpart. Players who would be considered first-ballot material in the US often wait years in Japan, and three-time Triple Crown winner Hiromitsu Ochiai’s demeanor with the media still overshadows his on-field credentials. It’s possible that when the time comes, voters will look at Rhodes’ acrimonious departure from the Yomiuri Giants in 2005 and his sub-par glove work, and decide to leave him off their ballots.

Regardless of what happens next, it’s been quite a run in the alternate universe for Rhodes.

I’m sure there are more than a few FanGraphs readers qualified for this job:

Major League organization is looking for a motivated individual with significant (5+ years) experience in both web development and database application design/maintenance for a full-time position. Must have experience or working knowledge in all of the following areas: Linux (Ubuntu a plus), PHP, PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS, Unix Shell Scripting, Python, Ruby, and XML data importing. Understanding baseball statistics and player evaluation methodologies is also required. Love of baseball will definitely help but is not strictly required.

Please send your resume and a brief explanation of your experience to mlbprogrammer@gmail.com.

Assuming he passes his physical, Colby Lewis is returning from Japan to his Texas Rangers roots.

Nothing has been written about Lewis this year without mentioning his two outstanding seasons with the Hiroshima Carp, most notably his other-worldly walk rate. But was it Lewis or Japan? We won’t really know until we see Lewis take to the hill in Arlington, but I can pass along a little insight from this NPB Sabermetric guide I picked up on my recent trip to Japan

Let’s start with that K:BB ratio. Lewis posted 9.79 K’s for every BB in 2009. The next best control pitcher in all of Japan was Chiba Lotte’s Yoshihisa Naruse at 5.57, and Yu Darvish, for comparison, posted a 3.71 rate. Lewis pitched in the DH-free Central League, where hitters accordingly struck out more than in the Pacific League, but the gulf between him and anyone else was so wide I’m going to say that this one was more Colby than Japan. Somewhat weirdly though, Lewis plunked 14 batters in ’09, nearly as many as the 19 he walked.

Thanks to his mastery of the strike zone, Lewis managed a .99 WHIP and a league-leading 2.53 DIPS figure, despite a .317 BABIP which was a bit below the Central League average of .298. And 2009 wasn’t exactly a fluke, as Lewis put up similar numbers in 2008.

Lewis’s success over the last two years recalls Koji Uehara’s excellent 2002-3 seasons, when he posted K/BB figures of 182/23 and 194/23 respectively. Uehara finally got his wish of playing in MLB last year, and despite being injury-prone and past his prime, still put respectable numbers in his limited number of starts. Lewis is doesn’t have Uehara’s injury history and is coming of the best seasons of his career. So there are reasons to be optimistic, and Lewis is definitely an interesting, low-risk alternative to guys like Jon Garland and Carl Pavano.

This past week, while a lot of us were on hiatus, there was a good bit of discussion going on in the blogosphere about the role stats played in baseball. This eventually led to “The Mike Silva Chronicles” posts over at insidethebook.com, in which Mike Silva asked 10 questions and Tangotiger answered them. They’re without a doubt worth reading.

One of these posts in particular had to do with “Stats Saturation” in which Mike Silva asked:

Do you believe the advanced metric community is saturating the market with stats, to the point where progress that was initially made with the evolution of traditional stats is now minimal at best. Wouldn’t it be wiser to allow some of the current metrics to gain acceptance before you “advance the current advanced metrics” (corny phrase so to speak).

FanGraphs has been around for almost 5 years and this is a question which is frequently on my mind.

For the most part, FanGraphs does not create new statistics. It’s more of an aggregation of what I consider the best publicly available sabermetric work on the internet from the minds of people like Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, Dan Szymborski, Dave Studeman, Sean Smith, with contributions from many others including our own staff.

There are certainly a lot of stats available on FanGraphs. By my count there are well over 100 different metrics available for batters and pitchers, which are generally broken into logical sections which make them a bit easier to handle. Some of these stats have caught on more in the mainstream, while others I’m sure will continue to only be used among the sabermetric crowd.

With so many stats, I can certainly understand the question of why things might be getting overkill with additional stats. The truth of the matter is that there really are different categories of stats and even those who are not particularly interested in sabermetrics are very much interested in scouting statistics.

Four of the stat sections on FanGraphs are devoted entirely to scouting statistics. These include the Pitch Types, Plate Discipline, and Batted Ball sections. The data in these sections is based literally off what Baseball Info Solutions scouts see. There are no fancy calculations and everything is fairly intuitive. Was the ball in the strike zone or out of the strike zone? How fast was the pitch and what type of pitch was it? Is there room for some disagreement on these? Of course. There’s always going to be some disagreement between scouts, but you really can’t blame the formulas.

Which brings us to the stats which are based on formulas. Many of the metrics on FanGraphs are rooted in “linear weights”. wOBA, wRC, wRAA, wRC+, FIP, and the Batting component of our Value section are all entirely linear weight based. These all use linear weights to measure different things, or in some instances the same thing expressed in a different way. But at their heart they’re all measuring bucketed stats in runs.

Now neither scouting stats nor linear weight based stats are, in my mind, particularly controversial. There are, however, controversies on how linear weights are adjusted, such as by park or by league. And then when scouting stats and linear weights are combined, it seems to be a particularly hot button issue. UZR, for instance, relies on both scouting data (where the ball landed, how hard it was hit, its trajectory) and turns that data into linear weights depending on how the ball was classified, and then adjustments are also applied.

UZR and the Pitch Type values are really statistical scouting. They’re all about putting a value on what you see.

So getting back to Mike Silva’s question of if it’s better to wait for acceptance before introducing new stats, I’ll say it depends. The standard linear weight based stats on FanGraphs aren’t going anywhere. I really don’t think it’s worth introducing an entirely new named set of statistics for what might be a very small increase in accuracy. The current ones may from time to time be tweaked slightly, but they’ll remain under the same familiar names and will represent the same things.

Though when it comes to stats that really do bring a new point of view, whether it be with new scouting data, or drastically different models, then I’ll say they’re welcome at FanGraphs. The other type of stat that I’m not opposed to adding is one that makes an existing model more accessible, which I felt was the case with wRC+.

With all that said, I’d just like to throw out a quick reminder for the new year about thinking. Please take the time to understand the stat you’re using before you use it in an argument and before you criticize it. It’s best when the stats available on this site are used in thoughtful, open-minded discussions that enhance your knowledge and, most importantly, your enjoyment of the game of baseball.

It’s the final two: this means you are choosing the MORE outstanding player. MORE. Got that? MORE.

Balloting now closed.

Who was the MORE outstanding player?

Alomar, Roberto   44.8%
Blyleven, Bert    55.2%

Total votes: 563

Knocked out:
Ventura
Appier
Da Murphy
McGriff
Dawson
Trammell
McGwire
Edgar
Larkin
Raines

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Patrick Newman, and this is my first post here at FanGraphs. Some of you may be familiar with my blog, npbtracker.com. If you haven’t seen it before, I write about Japanese baseball, covering current events and analyzing top players. Starting today, I’ll be doing the same here on a semi-weekly basis.

Every year, players move back and forth between the top leagues in Japan and North America. So let’s kick things off by looking at a few of the guys looking to change leagues this offseason.

Imports

This year’s NPB free agent class is the weakest we’ve seen in quite some time, but there are some interesting arms making the MLB leap this offseason.

The head of the class

• Ryota Igarashi (signed with the Mets)
• Colby Lewis (destination unknown)

Igarashi and Lewis make for an interesting contrast — Igarashi is a power reliever with middling control; Lewis, though no slouch on velocity, is a starter who’s shown pinpoint command in his two NPB seasons. I’ve casually observed that raw velocity usually survives the journey across the Pacific, while control typically suffers.

Will Igarashi’s command degrade at the MLB level, and if so will it hurt his effectiveness? And was Lewis’s dominant K:BB performance a function of pitching in Japan, or an improvement he made?

The other candidate

• Hisanori Takahashi (destination unknown)

Takahashi is the only other MLB-caliber player out of Japan seeking MLB employment at this point (we may see someone posted later in the offseaon). Takahashi is a lefthanded garbage baller with good sinker/screwball, but a sub-par fastball.

Exports

Over the course of a typical season, the 12 NPB teams will employ a cumulative 70-80 “foreign” players. Note that “foreign” is in quotes because it’s NPB’s own definition of the word. Tuffy Rhodes, for example, is no longer considered a foreign player because he’s accumulated enough NPB service time to qualify as Japanese player under NPB’s rules. JapaneseBaseball.com has a rundown of the rules governing foreign NPB players.

Back to the point, most foreign players in Japan only stay for a year or two, so there’s a high degree of roster churn each offseason, opening up opportunities for a new group of players.

In most cases, Japanese teams prefer “hungry” types, guys with years of AAA success who haven’t gotten extended MLB looks and still have something to prove. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but here’s a look at a couple of the more interesting players making that leap this year.

Contact-hitting outfielders

• Matt Murton (bound for Hanshin Tigers)
• Jeff Fiorentino (Hiroshima Carp)

Though Murton has significantly more MLB experience, these two outfielders head to Japan with the same minor league profile: good contact skills, good strikezone judgement, gap power. Their 2009 Triple-A slash lines are virtually identical at .324/.389/.499 (Murton) and .312/.387.510 (Fiorentino).

Despite their similarities, the two are going to very different environments. Murton joins the Hanshin Tigers, a team whose last two American outfielders (Kevin Mench and Lew Ford) were miserable busts, and with a demanding, yet supportive fanbase that expects to win. Fiorentino will find himself in a different situation in Hiroshima, a team with an air of optimism in a beautiful new stadium, but one that has not been in contention this decade.

Hard-throwing, wild relievers

• Juan Morillo (Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles)
• Chris Bootcheck (Yokohama BayStars)
• Eulogio de la Cruz (Tokyo Yakult Swallows)

Perhaps due to the success of Marc Kroon, pitchers with plus velocity but control issues that have kept them off MLB rosters have become a popular target for NPB teams. All three of the guys listed can run their fastballs into the mid-90s and Morillo tops out in triple digits. 2010 will tell whether any of these guys becomes another Kroon, or flames out like similar hard-throwers Chris Resop and Scott Dohmann.

With another Yankees World Championship comes another round of salary cap debate. The Yankees have an infield that costs a gaudy amount and easily make the most revenue of any other team. The idea of implementing a cap limits how much they can spend on free agents or absorb via trades, which seems to make the playing field a bit more even. But there’s a forgotten aspect to all of this: If you limit the Yankees Major League payroll from $200M to $100M (or whatever) without imposing a cap on the amount of money a team can spend on amateur and baseball operations talent, then really you aren’t helping anyone but the Yankees.

Why? Because if you knock that $50M off the Yankees payroll, that doesn’t mean they cannot spend it; instead, it simply means they must reallocate it to another part of the game. Now they can really go over-slot on a consistent basis. Or, if a hard-slotting system is imposed, they can reap the international talent market like none other. Not to mention the amount of front office talent they can add to the fold — ranging from scouts to quantitative analysis guys to medical staff and so on.

Living off free agency is usually a poor habit to fall into, because when signing a 30 – 32-year-old player, teams are paying for his past performances more than his future performances. By eliminating that practice for the Yankees, they can quickly develop the best farm system, player development, and front office staffs around and still have money to burn. Then, when those young players turn into young stars under a cost efficient umbrella, the Yankees can go out and do their spending thing on the free agent market with a bunch of homegrown studs intact.

You could argue they could do this already, but won’t for whatever reason. Maybe they haven’t realized it, or they would rather bank off the big-time free agents. I don’t know. This may result in fewer wins in the short-run, but a healthier organization in the long-run. Baseball would actually be doing the Yankees a service by saving them from themselves.

Perhaps that’s a wee bit hyperbolic, but the answer to any question about baseball’s competitive nature and balance lies beyond a Major League roster salary cap.

UZR and like minded fielding statistics were almost mentioned by name on tonight’s Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry David got into a fight with a stonemason about whether or not Derek Jeter sucks. Here’s a transcript of the phone conversation:

Stonemason: “That guy [Derek Jeter] sucks.”

Larry David: “Who sucks?”

Stonemason: “Derek Jeter, he’s the most overrated player in baseball.”

Larry David: “What did you say?”

Stonemason: “I can’t stand Derek Jeter, you know he’s the worst defensive shortstop in baseball statistically?”

Larry David: “Oh Bullshit! He’s a great clutch hitter, he’s a great clutch player!”

Stonemason: “There’s no way he deserves that kind of money he’s making.”

And then Larry David changes the subject.

Later in the episode, Larry David starts talking about the stonemason’s Jeter hating and says, “…starts telling me how Jeter’s overrated. What an ignorant moron. My God, please, give me a break. There’s not one person who has ever said that except this asshole, honestly.”

While the part about Jeter being one of the worst shortstops defensively is true, he has come pretty close to being worth what he’s paid, at least in a cumulative sense over the past 8 years.

In any case, it was fun to see fielding stats mentioned on Curb Your Enthusiasm, even if it wasn’t Larry David defending them.