Raw Japan

MLB pitches to Kikuchi

Major League Baseball teams are lining up to lure Japanese high school baseball pitcher Yusei Kikuchi across the Pacific to join them in an unprecedented raid on the country’s young talent.

Kikuchi, an 18-year-old left-hander from Hanamaki Higashi High School in northern Japan, would be the most coveted young Japanese player to join an MLB team, but he is equally desired by Japan’s 12 professional teams.

His star rose at the national high school baseball tournament this summer as his 155 kph (96mph) fastball dazzled. Japan’s Koshien tournment is a big thing even for non-baseball fans in Japan, as the event catapults high school players into the pro ranks.

Sometimes just one high school star can affect an entire team’s fortunes. Masahiro Tanaka, now a starting pitcher for Japan’s Rakuten Golden Eagles, was a high school phenomenon in the summer of 2006.

MLB, which had previously observed a kind of “gentleman’s agreement” with Japanese pro baseball that it would not recruit high school talent, made no overt offers to Tanaka, unlike the aggressive efforts with Kikuchi.  

Tanaka, who won 15 games this year, has also helped Rakuten increase fans. His team is now playing against the Nippon Ham Fighters in its first play-off season, a homecoming for Tanaka as he played in Hokkaido during his high school days and has many fans there.

Kikuchi may become another Tanaka in the future. That is, if MLB teams do not swoop in and remove a future star from Japanese playing fields.

The Hit Parade

Ichiro Suzuki has reached 2,000 career hits in 1,402 MLB games — the second-fastest pace ever — while over his nine seasons in MLB the Seattle Mariners star has ended on base once in about every three trips to the plate, based on his career batting average.

Add in his 1,278 Japanese hits, in shorter seasons, and Ichiro at 36 is pointing his bat at very rare professional air, including 3,000 career MLB hits and — on a cumulative basis — Pete Rose’s record 4,256 hits. He already set the MLB season hit record with an amazing 262 in 2004 and will likely be the first player, in a matter of days, to ever record 200 hits in nine consecutive seasons.

Still, when I asked Robert Whiting, author of “The Meaning of Ichiro”, at mid-season if the Japanese hitting phenomenon was a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, he wasn’t certain. He cited the failure of Roger Maris, whose feat of 61 home runs in a season was not deemed worthy enough, adding that Ichiro would likely need to break the 3,000 hit threshold to be a first ballot inductee.

That means another four to five seasons, eminently do-able for arguably the greatest baseball export Japan has produced, but a deep line in the baseball sand that may make it hard for compatriots to join him at the Hall, at least with current rules on mandated domestic team service before free agency.

Last week was the 45th anniversary of Masanori Murakami’s debut with the San Francisco Giants, the first Japanese to play briefly in MLB. Murakami, a pitcher not in the Hall, waited three decades for Hideo Nomo to follow him across the Pacific, and his basic message to Japanese players now is go if you can, because the best measuring stick for greatness is MLB — and a better salary doesn’t hurt.

Japan baseball still in little league?

I like going to watch baseball games, not just for the refreshments but also the great team-play on the field.

In Japan, you cannot win just with one or two stars, needing a team solid in both defence and offence.

Many Japanese share this feeling and that’s why the imported sport of baseball has become our No.1 sport.

Every night TV sports starts with results from professional baseball games, while tabloid newspapers’ top stories focus on the national pastime.

Yet most Japanese pro baseball teams are not making a profit. They pay a lot of money to rent stadiums, but at the same time have never really focused on profitability as corporate owners cover losses.

That might not matter immediately to fans, but the weak financial heath of teams contributes to why Japanese players leave for Major League Baseball,  as teams can afford to pay, relatively, amazing salaries.

As a fan, I would like to believe in the potential of Japan’s baseball business, but the two big leagues only started taking it seriously a few years ago.

Throwing good money after…

Daisuke Matsuzaka’s second trip to the disabled list this season is making some forget the Japanese pitcher’s heroics and wonder if he has been worth the investment of his Boston Red Sox team.

The “Dice-K” sweepstakes dominated Japanese baseball in late 2006, as the Boston Red Sox pursued the rights to negotiate with Matsuzaka — who’s now sitting – by commiting over $51 million to his then team, the Seibu Lions, and another $52 million to the pitcher and agent Scott Boras to sign.

After winning the inaugural World Baseball Classic tournament MVP in 2006 with an arm that had dropped jaws since high school, Matsuzaka was more than just the best pitcher available in the country or arguably the world at that time.

He was Boston’s marketing passport to baseball-mad Japan and its talent pool, as well as a poke in the eye for the rival New York Yankees who were outbid and had to settle for pitcher Kei Igawa, who’s spent most of his career in the minors at a total cost of about $46 million in contract and posting fee.

Dice-K’s first year was rather underwhelming, but the Sox won their second World Series in three years and he pitched well in the post-season.  Not surprisingly, Boston raised its hand to begin the 2008 MLB season in Japan, with Matsuzaka and teammate Hideki Okajima helping “Red Sox Nation” literally to try to annex the archipelago.

Asia’s baseball classic

Say, Amen, somebody!

The creators of the World Baseball Classic envisioned a global tournament spread over at least two continents and multiple time zones, featuring the greatest players and national teams possible.

That baseball aim, largely achieved in the inaugural 2006 event and even more so this year, may not completely jibe with the all-Asian WBC final between Japan and South Korea in LA on Monday, but no fan of the sport’s finest would complain after an thrilling extra-inning game that ended in a 5-3 win to Japan.

Back home in Japan and South Korea, it was office hours on Tuesday but work stopped as fans gathered in TV stores, in front of huge stadium screens or around TV-equipped mobile phones to watch the two Asian rivals slug it out.  South Korea overturned a day-time television ban to let prison inmates watch the game while forex trading in Seoul trading rooms ground to a halt from the opening pitch.

Obviously, some holes remain in the tournament, such as MLB team buy-in and particularly scheduling, which led to an incredible fifth pairing of the Asian rivals in a 16-team tournament.

But there were reasons why Japan, the defending WBC titleholders, and South Korea, the Olympic champs, dispatched Venezuela, Cuba and the U.S. in a convincing progression to the final. Their play underscored baseball fundamentals of teams over individuals, as well as having a pitcher or three.

Colonel Sanders returns

After nearly a quarter century on the bottom of a Japanese river, Colonel Sanders has come up smiling.

Ecstatic fans of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team in 1985 tossed a statue of the Kentucky Fried Chicken founder into the Dotonbori River in Osaka, western Japan, when the perpetual underdogs won their first Central League pennant in 21 years.

 Tigers fans, who saw a resemblance between the Colonel and the team’s bearded American slugger, Randy Bass, jumped into what was then one of Japan’s most polluted rivers when the losing streak ended — and took the life-size statue along for the swim.

The Tigers went on to win the Japan Series championship in 1985, but have never done so again, prompting some to suggest the missing Colonel had cast a curse.

A diver checking for unexploded World War Two ordnance in the river as part of a clean-up found the Colonel’s top half on Tuesday, minus his hands, but still sporting his trademark string tie and grin.

“When I heard the statue had been found, I felt that history had ended,” Yoshio Yoshida, 75, the former Hanshin manager, was quoted by the Asahi newspaper as saying. “Recalling 1985, I’d like them to achieve the dream of being Japan No. 1 again.”

The Colonel’s smile might have widened, if it could, when his bottom half was recovered and reunited with the top on Wednesday.

Samurai night fever

Sports rivalries are bred by proximity, culture and history, and few match ups in Asia have more baggage or bragging rights at stake than baseball games between Japan and South Korea, the respective World Baseball Classic and Olympic titleholders.

Both crowns were sources of national pride, but Japan’s came in 2006 after losing twice to Korea before a semifinal victory over the Seoul side, which wasn’t enthused that a team it had beaten more than once could become  tournament champions.

The 2008 Beijing Games saw Tokyo and Seoul send their top non-MLB squads, but Japan returned medal-less and humbled, including a loss to Korea, whose gold made it the 2009 WBC regional favourite.

In the first rematch Saturday, Samurai Japan won 14-2, a laugher for everyone but the Koreans and pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who displayed the erratic control bedeviling his Red Sox career so far. The “called game” victory ensured the hosts would advance to the second round, while setting up a game against the stunned Koreans Monday, who blistered the Chinese in their next outing.

But pitching, a by-product of near year-round Asian training and why regional teams have fared so well in the early season tournament, was the story in Game Two, with Japan’s Hisashi Iwakuma allowing only two hits but leaving down 1-0.

Ichiro Suzuki woke up the slumbering Samurai with a late single, but Japan immediately followed with a “kanri yakyu” (businessman baseball) sacrifice bunt, even with one out. Japanese media in the Tokyo Dome nodded in acknowledgement, while the foreign press saw this as certain futility, essentially killing the comeback opportunity.

Whirling Darvish

Half-Japanese, half-Iranian, but possibly Major League Baseball’s most coveted Asian prospect, Yu Darvish is pitching the opener of the World Baseball Classic tournament in Tokyo, the main question for many is how long he will continue to be only a local player.

The template for exports was set by Japan teammate Daisuke Matsuzaka, who followed his MVP effort in the 2006 WBC with an eye-popping $103 million contract with the Boston Red Sox, some $50 million of which went to his Seibu LIons, just for letting the right-hander leave Japan.

The amount was reportedly equal to the Lions entire 2006 team budget, and Darvish’s Nippon Ham Fighters may be eyeing that potential pay day without wanting too quickly to usher in his semi-free agency in the baseball-mad nation.

In sports parlance, Darvish, 48-19 since turning pro in 2005 with a miniscule 2.33 ERA, is filthy, and China Manager Terry Collins, a former skipper of MLB’s Angels and Japan’s Orix, was not relishing the chance to begin the WBC against a player he called “one of the best pitchers in the world”. (Ed. note – Darvish winning pitcher in 4-0 victory, allowing no hits in four innings.)

Still, the 22-year-old has not pitched particularly well this spring, nor in last summer’s failed effort to medal at the Beijing Olympics, but a strong WBC may raise Darvish’s eventual MLB payday, assuming he wants to go.

Under cross-Pacific baseball rules, MLB teams cannot contact Japanese talent before their pro team posts them and bids are taken.

Hitting bottom

Ichiro Suzuki, arguably Japan’s greatest baseball export to Major League Baseball in terms of achievements, is facing what may be the worst spring of his combined Japanese and Major League Baseball career, with his image as the most prolific hitter of this era and a team-oriented star facing beanballs from both sides of the Pacific.

After a woeful season in which his Seattle Mariners lost over 100 games while dumping a full plate of managers, executives and players, Ichiro – who had a sub-par but not mediocre year – has heard a chorus of off-season chirping that the eight-year veteran was selfish, statistics-obsessed and playing by a different set of rules than teammates.

When you make $17.1 million on a team predicted by some to at least win its division that instead finishes dead last, there may be some explaining to do. But Ichiro decided to postpone the rebuilding process, again playing with Japan in the upcoming World Baseball Classic and holding off on the Mariners spring training until completing the WBC run.

Robert Whiting, author of “The Meaning of Ichiro“, told me that the rightfielder is being held accountable unfairly for the failings of the $100 million team.

“Who else on Seattle could carry his water? As for not being a team leader, well, I think it’s a cultural thing. The culture doesn’t work that way.”

After helping lead Japan to the 2006 WBC title, Ichiro’s participation this time was expected, but three years ago many assumed that he, and not the New York Yankees’ Hideki Matsui, would pass on the opportunity, not imagining that his hero, former Japan manager Sadaharu Oh, would ask him to play for the national side.