Japanese and Korean Prospects in Context
The MLB should be receiving a new crop of far eastern talent in the next year or two, which means it is worth reacquainting ourselves with the standouts and talent levels of these leagues — specifically the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) and Japan’s Nippon Pro Baseball league (NPB).
Let’s start with Korea and Pittsburgh’s potential new infielder, Jeong-ho Kang:
NOTE: I am using wOBA+ here, which is merely my shorthand for wRC+ without park factors and using MLB linear weights. So the numbers are not perfect, but they’re better than OPS or OPS+.
The KBO is a hitter’s league. That is the refrain we hear most often whenever Kang’s surfaces. He slashed a filthy .356/.459/.739 with 40 homers in 2014, and his career stats suggest he’s a middle infielder who hits like he’s from the corner. But how good is he with respect to the league?
Answer: He’s the best. But a wide margin.
Or at least he was in 2014. In 5 of the last 6 seasons, he’s been among the best hitters in Korea. The most consistently best might be Byung-ho Park — he clapped 52 homers in 2014. But Park plays first base, and Kang can handle at least 2B.
The light blue guys give us a feel of the quality of hitters in the KBO. Eric Thames was one of the best hitters in the KBO (131 wOBA+). If we’re feeling frisky, we can pretend he’s a decent proxy for an MLB hitter (he’s not; no one man is). And Thames crushed Triple-A pitching (think 140 wRC+ range) but was average (about 100 wRC+) in limited MLB time. So if he took a 30-point production hit, and for whatever crazy reason we conclude Kang will take the same exact hit, then he should hit around league average or a touch above average in good years.
For more on Kang, I suggest these articles:
• Getting Ready to Gamble on Jung-Ho Kang
• Fitting Jung-Ho Kang in Pittsburgh
• If Pirates Sign Kang, Then What?
Also: Jorge Cantu is a cool dude. I’m glad to see him doing well.
On the pitching side of the KBO, a plethora of former MLB farmhands dot the leaderboards. Andy Van Hekken and Rick van den Hurk have both carved out nice KBO career careers after their MLB careers failed to stick. With both of them on the gray side of thirty, a return to the MLB or MiLB seems unlikely — especially given that they are aces in Korea.
Hard-throwing lefty Gwang-Hyun Kim (or Kwang-Hyun Kim) might make for an interesting MLB prospect, but his control issues look serious to me. He’s only 26 in 2015, so he has time to figure some biz out.
Meanwhile, Hyeon-jong Yang — who sports a 4.33 ERA through 866.2 KBO innings — attempted to cross the ocean this winter only to have his team turn down the posting bid. He is probably one of the best homegrown pitchers in the KBO, and the ERA mark is no doubt muddied by the league’s run environment, but Yang is like a 27-year-old pitcher doing well in High-A. Few teams would be willing to break the bank him.
For comparison: Hyun-Jin Ryu had a 2.80 ERA in over a thousand KBO innings. His success in the majors is a testament to his personal talent, not necessarily an indication of the KBO’s untapped pitching talent.
Japan currently has at least three top-tier players looking to break into the majors:
• OF Yoshio Itoi (link showing his connection to MLB)
• SS/2B Takashi Toritani (link)
• LF/1B Sho Nakata (link)
Itoi is a gold-gloving outfielder who is probably past his fielding prime, but much like Norichika Aoki, he could bring a multi-faceted toolset necessary for big league success. He’s entering his age-33 season with a career .395 OBP — in a league averaging a .310 to .330 OBP. He steals a lot of bases and hits a few homers. He has played both center and right, but I doubt Itoi gets much of a look at center in the MLB.
Takashi Toritani is more of an iron-man infielder with no one great asset. He’s light on power, but has good plate discipline; he plays shortstop well and should be capable at second in the MLB; and he has like zero injuries ever. I have difficulty seeing Toritani as a starter in the MLB, but if Munenori Kawasaki — who was always a better fielder and baserunner but a worse hitter — can hang around the MLB and Triple-A, then a bench role for Toritani is well within possibility. He could maybe even be a fringe starter for some teams.
Nakata is the young one in the bunch. His offense has not wowed just yet, but he is only entering his age-26 season. The Mariners had interest in him before he went pro, and his success at the NPB level (106 HR in just 2507 PA, so about 25 HR per 600 PA) has probably done little to hurt his prospect status. Nakata is still about 3 years younger than his league, and if he gets posted soon (probably not this offseason), he would probably still need to season in Triple-A — barring a breakout between now and his posting.
He has played primarily left field, but I have no idea what kind of defender he is there. He is certainly no speedster, though, having stolen only 10 bases in four full seasons. He also legs out fewer doubles than we might expect for a guy with steady power. The quality of his defense could very well determine whether or not teams are willing to take a chance on him. If they see him as a 1B or just a DH, he will need a serious revelation with his bat before anyone bids on him.
A word should be said here about Wladimir Balentien. Writing for the Hardball Times Annual in 2014, I found a decent rule of thumb that hitters will lose about 20 points of wOBA+ transitioning to MLB lineups (whereas pitchers get stung by only about 10 points of FIP-). That means hitting success in the NPB needs to be notorious or it needs to be a complement to other skills.
Balentien’s hitting has become notorious. He set Japan’s HR record at 60 last year, and he continued to dominate the league in 2014. If we slice 20 points off his wOBA+, we get a 29-year-old corner outfielder with a 115 wOBA+ in 2014. That’s good enough to start on many MLB teams. If he ever chooses to come back to the Americas, he’ll no doubt have a chance to start, but it’s unlikely he’d be the annual All-Star he has become in Japan.
There are two main figures in the NPB pitching scene:
• SP Chihiro Kaneko link
• SP Kenta Maeda link
Kaneko and Maeda are two righties with sub-3.00 career ERAs in Japan. Kaneko is coming off a career year, but is already entering his age-31 season. He just re-signed with the Orix Buffaloes, but there is a real chance he will not finish that four-year deal without getting posted at some point. He has established himself as a reliable (even though unspectacular stuff-wise) pitcher, and the typically lame Bison of Hy?go Prefecture may choose to cash in on Kaneko’s talent if the 2015 or 2016 seasons turn awry.
Kaneko’s interest in the MLB appears tepid, so there’s always a chance he stays in Japan and has a happy, long career in the NPB. But if he continues to experience this level of success, I imagine he gets restless like Yu Darvish and crosses the ocean in search of better hitters to make look foolish.
Maeda is the big name from Japan this year. As the above link notes, though, his team decided against posting him. Maeda appears eager to reach the MLB, and since he is entering his age-27 season with a career 2.44 ERA, I think he will accomplish that aim.
Last February, FanGraphs alumnus Patrick Newman named several additional NPB prospects, but I’d like to focus on perhaps the one furthest from reaching the majors: Two-way star Shohei Otani. He is entering his age-20 season and he is already the 2nd-best starting pitcher in Japan. He has a 3.07 ERA through 217 career NPB innings — oh, and he had a 117 wOBA+ in 234 PA this last season. We might be inclined to think Otani is just one of many two-way stars in Japan’s talent-hungry league, but no. Otani is the first since 1968, according to Newman.
If the Fighters post Otani, he would almost certainly go for the maximum bid, but with the new, low ceiling for posting bids, the Fighters may not want to post Otani. Ever. He is a capable right fielder who throws 100-mph and isn’t even old enough to drink in the US. If and when MLB teams get a chance to sign him, it will be a feeding frenzy.
Here is a copy of the stats used in this post, if’n you’re okay with downloading Excel files from strangers on the internet.
Phenomenal, extremely well done.
Thanks!
What happened to Brady Aiken?
Just out of curiosity, where would Ryan Vogelsong have ranked in your hierarchy.
Vogelsong’s success in 2011 and 2012 was a complete surprise to me. He was never really impressive in Japan, as far as I perceived at least. I guess that’s why Giants scouts make the big bucks.
If Shohei Otani and Yoan Moncada were both eligible for the 2015 MLB draft, would one of them be drafted first overall?
That’s a great question. I think, ’twere this present version of Otani made available in the draft, he would go No. 1 — simply because he’s already dominating the NPB. As an amateur a few years ago, I dunno. Maybe he’d go in the first round or the supplementals, but I don’t think he’d be No. 1.
I don’t know enough about Yoan Moncada to speak intelligently on him.
Otani is the best pitching prospect at that age in the history of baseball, IMO. He just turned 20, has three plus pitches, and throws over a hundred. Plus he sustains his velocity well. A start of his I watched the other day had him throwing 99+ through the 8th inning. Plus he’s already dominating at a high level of competition. And he’s a pretty good hitter too.
The closest comparison I could think of was Josh Beckett coming out of high school. But he was nowhere near Otani’s level. Strasburg was at that level, but was a few years older.
I hope he doesn’t get overworked, and can come to the MLB when he’s eligible for international free agency. He’ll never get posted as long as there is a limit.
Kind sir, did you call me?
Supposedly, Otani’s contract says he can demand to be posted at any time. I heard them say this during the broadcasts of the recent US-Japan series in which he pitched. So we may see him in MLB sooner as opposed to later. He has less than 1.5 years service time in Japan so far, so he may want to pitch there at least a couple more years.
Heck, maybe Otani is a better prospect than Felix Hernandez, Dwight Gooden and Jose Fernandez were, all of whom reached the majors by age 20 or 19 in the case of Felix and Gooden but I doubt it. In the history of baseball? C’mon.
I remember reading news about Shohei Otani a few years back, the kid with 100 mph fast ball, planning to come over to North America directly. Not much was mentioned about his hitting skills though at that time. I will be a shame if we never get to see him facing MLB hitters on a regular basis because the posting fee limit will make the team never posting him …
Great article Brad !
NPB players gain international free agency after 9 years of service time. So even if they are never posted, they still might come to MLB, but they have to wait longer for the opportunity.
Very interesting. Shouldn’t Byung-Hyun Kim, a 9-year MLB veteran, be in light blue?
He is Korea-born player, not a foreign player. So he is just blue, not light blue.
Mr. Punch is right. That’s an error on my behalf. The light blue indicates MLB or MiLB vets.
wOBA+ is not really appropriate if you want to compare that to wRC+ because those are on a different scale.
actually OPS+ with a weighting of 1.2 for OBP/lgOBP and 0.8 for SLG/lgSLG is almost as good as wRC+ without park adjustments.
Doing that real quick gives me a 185 OPS+ for Kang. Plugging in the Korean stats in my spreadsheet I get a 188 wRC+ with custom weights for the Korean league.
Thames chkecks in with an 163 OPS+ and a 166 wRC+ (custom Korean)
If we were to treat this data point to be somewhat meaningful just assume hitters see an increse in productivity that is 1.6 times their MLB level.
Another assumption: regressing Kang’s true talent to a still monstrous 165 wRC+ and using that 1.6 translation I think chances are he might be a league average or slightly better hitter in MLB.
Who is Brandon Dickson? He doesn’t seem like the type who was born in Japan and never played anywhere else. Or are the dark blue lines for those that never made it into a single MLB game?
I color-coded the players by hand. So I’m not surprised if I missed a few MLB/MiLB vets.
Dickson has a World Series ring (’11)
Excellent, Mr. Woodrum. Is it too much to ask for a sequel with three year statistics?
Very interesting and thought provoking
What u don’t know is that KBO’s stats go up and down too often. It’s not a hitters’ league. It was this year, but it wasn’t in 2012 that hyun jin ryu pitched. The league’s stats really depends on the quantity of quality pitchers of that season. You cannot compare two or three different seasons together in this kind of league. U have to look up other players’ stats of that season like u just did with thames of 2014, and have to compare it only in 2014 seasons. 2013 and 2012 seasons are totally different seasons in this kind of league. This occurs because of the short of population of the nation, the short of baseball population, and the short of enough athletic players with arms. It flows well though, but sometimes it breakes out when there are short of quality pitchers. 2014 was that kind of season. 1999~2005seasons were like this too, and there were 56homerun guy at that time.
Actually, KBO had an issue on baseball this season. Ball making companies provided poor quality balls that bounces like a rubber ball thanks to KBO’s lame regulation.
Please, keep using “u” to tell me what I “have” to do.
I’m fed up with the high-A comparison. KBO is better high-A. Lots of fringe MLB guys fail in KBO. You have to look further than only 2014… Now KBO teams seem to chose their guys more wisely cause they know the kind of skills that work in Korea, but the failure rate is still high, and all are at least good AAA players. Note: historically foreign hitters have done much better than foreign pitchers.
I’m still at a loss as to why the MLB pushed the new posting rules, or why people would think that this benefits the players. You can see how the NPB benefit, of course, keeping the best talents at home, but it was obvious from the get-go that this would practically eliminate the posting of premier Japanese players until their last years of team control, cancelling out any benefit that the player might have gotten from free negotiation.
If the new posting agreement was already in place before Otani was drafted, he would probably have gone to the US rather than sign with the Hams.
When has MLB ever cared about allowing players to freely negotiate?
All the more inexplicable that they’ll push an agreement that (theoratically) gave players more negotiating freedom while reducing the flow of international talent into MLB.
It’s probably a little better than high-A, but it’s not as good as Double-A. The biggest step up in competition in the U.S. minors is going from A to AA. And when Eric Thames and Andy van Hekken are superstars in your league, you might be better than high-A, but not by a whole lot.
On a side note, when guys named van Hekken and van den Hurk are two of the best pitchers in the league (and Nippert could very well be a Dutch name, too), maybe the KBO should spend some time scouting the Hoofdklasse Honkbal for pitching talent.
The hitter’s stats in KBO are determined by various factors: percentage of tier 1 pitchers, strike zone settings, the number of sluggers (including foreign players), ball elatricity, etc. Based on previous year’s results, KBO sets these variables, determining next year’s league average.
2012, in which Ryu pitched lastly, was pitcher’s league in KBO while 2014 was extreme hitter’s league. League average OPS in 2012 was .698 while .807 in 2014. You cannot directly compare classic stats such as ERA and HR. But we can compare some proportional stats with other players in other years, using weighted stats such as OPS+ (or wOBA+ here).
I mean you should compare Yang and Kim with Ryu in compensated FIP rather than simple ERA or FIP. Of course, Ryu was outstanding while he was pitching at the same time with Yang and Kim. But, this year, Yang’s performance was a bit comparable to Ryu’s previous ones.
Ryu was KBO mvp when he was 19 and Yang never been a candidate. And those KBO pitchers will not come to MLB in their prime time unless they get paid at least 3M/year, which is bit expensive for unknown RP.
…But only one Cheech…
“….if’n you’re okay with downloading Excel files from strangers on the internet.”
Dude, for stats like these, I’d get into your windowless van in my school parking lot and let you give me a ride home.
agreed with all the complements, great article!
compliments (typed too fast)
I’ve started gathering the data to produce park factors for both the KBO and NPB, and I hope to have them in the next week or two.
Awesome! I look forward to it!
Luke Scott had played with the O’s and Ray’s. I believe he had been pretty good with them, but he was terrible this year in Korea. Yes, Eric Tames has played really great this year in Korea, at the same time I think he did not get enough chances to prove himself with the Jays. For some reason, he had been getting worse with a couple of other teams after he was traded. More than 70 % of border line MLB players (obviously they are going to KBO and NPB) can’t make it more than 2 yrs there for whatever reasons. It probably apply same way the other way around at the very least or I guess the failure rate would obviously be more higher due to higher challenging talents when KBO or NPB players come to MLB.
My point is that it does just not automatically translate to their skill sets or stats between the leagues one way or the other. Even with same MLB, same players’ stats can not guarantee to next year either. IMHO, if you are good, you are good no matter what kind of league you are playing at the moment as long as you are considering to compare about top 5 to 10 % of their respective leagues with evidences provided by WBC games. I think it’s just about consistences, age groups, and how many innings your arm can endure (Pitcher’s case) and personalities (including how to adopt culture shocks even players with same in North America) as long as they are more than AA competition.
Luke Scott had a 109 wOBA+ by my count. That’s not bad, though maybe a little disappointing. It’s my understanding, however, that he received only 130 PA because of a conflict in the clubhouse. It’s really hard to estimate the talent level of the KBO based on 130 PA.
That being said, yes: Each player needs to be estimated on their own merits. It is unhelpful for us to assume a surface analysis of the league average will apply universally to all players (see: Hiroyuki Nakajima).
Thames’ 97 wRC+ projection for 2015 from Steamer looks, to me, like good news for Kang and the Pirates considering Kang was at least 10% better at the plate than Thames was in KBO (especially because Kang’s an IF). I’d take a ~105 wRC+ from a $5M IF’er all day long.
I read the name Andy Van Hekken, and thought to myself “Was he a Tiger? Yea, he was a Tiger, I think a lanky lefty that kind of sucked…”
Then I clicked and saw he pitched 30 innings for the Tigers in 2002. Sorry for the ridiculously pointless post, but I’m quite proud of myself that I remembered someone who had such a minimal impact on a terrible team from 12+ years ago when I was 14, haha.
Did you play MVP Baseball 2003? That helps.
Otani gets all the hype, but I am a Fujinami supporter. He is around the same age as Otani and has ptiched more because Nippon-Ham has continued to use Otani in the field instead of making him a full time pticher. Fujinami has a FB that can touch 100 and a nice 12-6 Curve. Since he is only around 20 yrs. old, control is still an issue. I always try to put in a good word for Fujinami when people talk about the “next wave” of NPB talent but fail to mention him
And somehow, Seo, with wOBA+ 120, won the Korean MVP over Kang, Park and Van Hekken!
When we predict or evaluate only based on the former MLB players that recorded above average in FIP and wOBA or whatever stat, will deliver anything highly biased, since I remember a lot more and bigger names from MLB to KBO than the names that appear above have failed in KBO. (I remember even how Alfonso Soriano did in Japan when he was young before he moved to MLB and hit a mega heat..) That implies that kind of comparison across the leagues reflects just the difference in style of how they play baseball, not any definitive monotonically ranked ability that only God knows.
And also funny thing about the picther chart is, which similarly comes from the fact that we are only looking at those above average, some might think that, looking at the chart, oh, there are a lot of former AAA/AA picthers who succeeded in KBO as, for example, starting pitcher, because there will be roughly same amount of picthers below the average, so they are all way above than average! No, out of all 23 starting pitchers who threw more than the minimal innings, 19 are already there up in the chart. so, it seems like they are above average, but actually not and it is just distorted impression.
very interesting take/read Bradley. Thank you for the information, I always wondered about the different skill levels for both Korean and Japan leagues in comparison to MLB, this helps a lot.
Awesome article. Question, what’s the best way I can watch Japanese and Korean baseball/get analysis?
I’d suggest visiting Yakyu Baka for league updates and light analysis:
http://yakyubaka.com/
But’s it’s more of a MLB Trade Rumors for the NPB than anything else. The NPB subreddit is pretty good, but the membership is limited:
http://www.reddit.com/r/npb
That’s also a good place to look for streaming questions.
And the Japan Times sports section is excellent, though they don’t write as much as I’d like (a byproduct of them covering all Japanese sports):
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/sports/baseball/
And then two blogs worth keeping track of:
KBO: http://www.mykbo.net/ (and be sure to join their FB page; lots of activity there)
NPB: http://www.npbtracker.com/ (this is Patrick Newman’s site; he doesn’t update often, but it’s wise to read every word he writes)
NPB: http://www.japanesebaseball.com/ (a message board many others have found useful, but I don’t participate much)
Thank you for the complement Bradley.