FanGraphs+ Player-Profile Game: Question #4

Play the player-profile game every day this week at 11:15am ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As Eno Sarris announced Monday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available for purchase with money. As in recent years, we’re celebrating the release of FG+ by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+.

Today’s entry was composed by the dumb, dumb author himself.

Who is it?

Towards the end of August, Jeff Sullivan observed a curious phenomenon regarding the split-finger fastball and those pitchers who throw it with some frequency. By way of illustration, consider the unordered list below, which features the birthplaces of every starter in 2014 to record at least 100 innings and also post a split-finger usage rate above 20%.

• Hyogo, Japan
• Osaka, Japan
• Tokyo, Japan
• Wyandotte, Michigan, USA

Those are the hometowns of Masahiro Tanaka, Hiroki Kuroda, Hisashi Iwakuma, and [THIS PLAYER], respectively. While, culturally speaking, one of these people isn’t like the other, all four pitchers feature remarkably similar repertoires — including merely average fastball velocities and relatively high split-finger usage. What else they share is success: all four prevented runs at an above-average rate in 2014 and produced the fielding-independent numbers to suggest that such run prevention is sustainable. For the three Japanese pitchers this is perhaps less surprising: each was expressly signed out of Japan with the idea (from the club’s point of view) that he’d be an asset to a major-league rotation. [THIS PLAYER], meanwhile, was undrafted after his senior year at Eastern Michigan University and signed afterwards with [HIS CLUB] for merely $10 thousand. Despite the lack of pedigree, the most likely outcome is that he approximates his 2014 numbers in 2015 — which he’ll begin as [HIS CLUB’S] number-three starter, it would appear.

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