Update to The Board: NPB Prospects

Continuing our week of updating the International Players tab over on The Board, today we’ve added the need-to-know pros from Nippon Professional Baseball, the top league in baseball-obsessed Japan. If you missed yesterday’s post surrounding Korea Baseball Organization players, you’re going to want to check that out, as lots of what is outlined there is also relevant for this batch of reports.

NPB is made up of 12 total teams split between two leagues, the Central and Pacific Leagues, with roughly half the teams concentrated in the area of the country surrounding Tokyo Bay. Now just over 70 years old, NPB essentially has one level of affiliated minor leagues (also split in two, they’re called the Eastern and Western Leagues), but allows its franchises to vary in the number of affiliates they control, which creates vast disparities in the number of minor league prospects or developmental players teams employ. The Giants and Hawks are Branch Rickey-ing this space while other teams are not.

MLB personnel tend to consider Japan at least on par with Triple-A ball in the U.S., and some (including your author) think it fits somewhere in the yawning chasm between the level of play at Triple-A and in the majors. Evidence that the latter is true: the Quad-A hitters who leave the U.S. for opportunities in Japan don’t tend to dominate the leaderboards; the best NPB players are usually Japanese. There are historical exceptions to this, but no foreign-born player has cracked the single-season top 10 of NPB position player WAR since Hector Luna in 2014.

There are also some indications that the gap is narrowing. Fastball velocities in Japan (averaged 90.8 mph in 2022) are still well below what is typical in MLB (93.6 mph), but like the pitchers on our shores, hurlers in Japan have begun to throw harder, and the rate at which velocity is growing in Japan is faster than in MLB. Here are the year-by-year average fastball velocities in each league dating back to 2014, when DeltaGraphs’ pitch velocity data tracking begins. Note the extent to which the gap between leagues has narrowed during that time:

There’s enough talent in NPB that it’s impractical to try to keep track of every single one of their MLB-quality players over on The Board. I take a narrower and more specific approach, focusing on players we know will be posted or sign as free agents soon even if they’re of medium impact (like Shintaro Fujinami), as well as those who I think could be MLB stars eventually even if we can conclude that they’re likely several years away due to the bonus and posting rules. Once again, MLB.com’s glossary has a very handy rundown of the current posting system and its history.

For the last couple of years, I’ve also spent time on players selected near the top of the NPB draft or who are playing for Japan’s U18 and U23 WBSC teams, but their performance upon turning pro has been extremely volatile, and with some exceptions, I think it will be best to let these guys air out in pro ball for a while before they show up on The Board. For example, outfielder Kenta Bright was the Dragons’ first rounder in 2021 out of Jobu University, one of just two position players taken in the first round. He flashed on film and offered more physical projection than was typical of an NPB prospect. Already 23, he hit just .211 in his first season in the minors. As such, while you can see the 2022 first round here and each team’s entire 2022 draft class here, none of those guys are on The Board just yet. If you’re really curious, I recommend copying the Japanese characters that comprise players’ name and searching YouTube with them. High school catcher Shion Matsuo, the second overall pick, is especially fun to watch against bad high school pitching.

While brand new pro players in Japan might go on the back-burner until they are given more of an opportunity to play, the young stars of the league demand our immediate attention. With both the KBO and NPB players now added to The Board, my hope is that readers have a pretty complete idea of who can make an MLB impact as soon as they are willing and able. Any of the players with a 40+ FV grade or above are considered potential impact players, with 50 FV players and up akin to a Top 100 prospect. Here’s a look at this upper crust of (mostly) young players, as well as an approximation of where they’d rank on an overall prospect list if applicable:

If you only read a handful of the Asian pro player reports on The Board, make it these ones (and that of Julin Tima), especially those of you in an open universe fantasy league. Murakami specifically is incredibly talented and powerful, and the process has already begun to set up his eventual transition to MLB.