Scouting Players From Asia: 2026-2027 Offseason Update

With the 2026 season in the books and a narrow window of transaction time upon us before an inevitable lockout, it’s time to start a new player evaluation cycle at FanGraphs. This includes 30 farm system deep dives, and updates to next year’s domestic draft and international amateur scouting reports on the site. But first, as has become tradition, it’s time to examine the notable pro players in Asia. Every offseason there are several fellows who are either native Asian players attempting to make a transition to MLB, or former MLB-affiliated players who are attempting to come back after some time abroad. Players in both camps tend to make a meaningful impact on the following MLB season, be it Munetaka Murakami, Foster Griffin, Kazuma Okamoto, Robert Suarez, or Drew Anderson. My goal at the start of every offseason is to give readers a thorough report on the players whose matriculation is imminent, as well a spyglass look at who lies over the horizon.
In this piece I’ll have the players clustered into buckets dictated by their anticipated arrival and write a bit about them in each section, but my preferential list of all the players and their full scouting reports are over on The Board. You should open The Board (seriously) in a new tab and traffic back and forth between it and this article. Also, remember we now have NPB and KBO leaderboards on the site, which I used heavily (along with DeltaGraphs and Yakyu Cosmopolitan) to sift through statistics and flag players to ask my sources about and/or perform my own visual scouting assessment via Synergy or TruMedia, whatever I can get my hands on. To give readers as thorough an understanding as possible, I’ve got video linked and embedded throughout this post for the players I think are most visually striking. Read the rest of this entry »










