SPORTS
April 2, 2018
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 13
Asians in American sports w Asian Americans in world sports
The newest and oldest Japanese
MLB players are both bargains
By Mike Street
Special to The Asian Reporter
AP Photo/Ben Margot
AP Photo/Elaine Thompson
C
ompensation has been one of the main challenges
surrounding players who move from Japan’s
Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) to Major
League Baseball (MLB). For every successful pitcher like
Hiroki Kuroda or Koji Uehara, there’s a high-flying
pitching bust like Daisuke Matsuzaka or Hideki Irabu.
And while there have been plenty of pitching successes,
very few NPB hitters at any price have succeeded in MLB.
This season, one NPB player who is outstanding at both
pitching and hitting will try to become the next Babe
Ruth, while another former NPB player will return to the
team where he first made his mark in MLB. And both have
proven to be bargains.
In the modern game, baseball is divided into pitchers
and hitters, and players almost never do both well. The
cringe-inducing sight of a pitcher flailing ineffectively at
the plate has become so commonplace that teams in both
MLB’s American League and NPB’s Pacific League use a
designated hitter to hit for the pitcher.
The last player to be a top-ranked pitcher and hitter was
Babe Ruth. More than a hundred years ago, he began his
career as a lights-out lefty for the Boston Red Sox. After he
led the league in home runs for two straight seasons,
Boston traded him to the New York Yankees, who took
him off the mound and put him in the field, where he made
history by crushing 665 of his 714 career home runs.
We may see Ruth’s equal in Shohei Ohtani, a
23-year-old who had spent his professional career so far
with the NPB Nippon Ham Fighters. In five seasons, the
flame-throwing righty notched a 42-15 record with a 2.52
ERA (Earned Run Average) and a 1.08 WHIP (Walks &
Hits per Innings Pitched). He also struck out more than a
batter per inning with a pitching repertoire that includes
a 100-mile-per-hour fastball complemented by a
devastating slider and splitter.
Any MLB team would be interested in a player like that
— especially one who is so young — but Ohtani is a force at
the plate too. Hitting lefty, Ohtani collected 48 home runs
and 70 doubles along with a .286 average in 1,170 plate
appearances. When Ohtani wasn’t pitching, Nippon put
Ohtani in the outfield or at designated hitter to keep his
dangerous bat in the lineup.
This combination of skills makes Ohtani an anomaly on
either side of the Pacific. Since the 1960s, there has never
been a pitcher who regularly played in the field or at
designated hitter. So when the Ham Fighters agreed to
post him for MLB teams to sign, Ohtani became one of the
most-coveted free agents on the market.
Incredibly, however, Ohtani’s youth hindered his
contract, thanks to MLB’s collective-bargaining
agreement. This agreement restricts players under age 25
to the league-minimum salary, while also capping the
signing bonuses available to international players. As a
result, the Los Angeles Angels signed Ohtani to a
two-year contract in December worth around $4 million.
That’s chump change compared to what other NPB
pitchers have been paid in MLB. Daisuke Matsuzaka
BASEBALL BARGAINS. Shohei Ohtani (left) of the Los Angeles Angels and Ichiro Suzuki (right) of the Seattle Mariners participate in Major
League Baseball (MLB) games on opening day in Oakland and Seattle, respectively, on March 29, 2018. Both athletes played on teams in Japan’s
Nippon Professional Baseball before moving to MLB.
signed a six-year contract for more than $52 million with
the Boston Red Sox in 2007, and Masahiro Tanaka signed
a six-year, $114-million contract with the Yankees in
2014. And neither possessed Ohtani’s prodigious hitting
skills.
Even the two other less-heralded NPB pitchers who
signed with MLB teams this season are making as much
as, or more, than Ohtani. Relievers Yoshihisa Hirano and
Kazuhisa Makita each signed two-year deals worth $6
million and $3.8 million with the Arizona Diamondbacks
and the San Diego Padres, respectively.
Claiming to be uninterested in money, Ohtani said he
signed with the Angels because he “just felt something
click.” But when his deal expires and he becomes eligible
for a bigger contract, Ohtani’s pay should be more in line
with his value — assuming he meets expectations in MLB.
Arguably, Ohtani might never have gotten the chance
to sign any MLB contract if it hadn’t been for Ichiro
Suzuki, the first NPB position player to come to MLB.
Since he arrived in Seattle in 2001, Ichiro’s accomplish-
ments have been too numerous to mention, but they
include winning Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable
Player in the same season, breaking George Sisler’s
“unbreakable” 84-year-old record for the most hits in a
season, and collecting his 3,000th hit at age 42.
When he first arrived in the league, however, Ichiro was
also undervalued. Because he was the first NPB hitter in
MLB, many doubted whether he could hit MLB pitching.
So his first Mariners contract was worth around $4
million per year, at a time when the average MLB salary
was about $2.2 million, and the highest-paid player, Alex
Rodriguez, made $22 million.
Even after Ichiro had proven himself, his salary
remained relatively modest. His three-year deal in 2004
was worth about $11 million annually, and his five-year
contract in 2008 earned him about $18 million annually.
The league-average contract in both years was around $3
million, and Rodriguez remained the best-paid player
both seasons, earning about $22 million in 2004 and $28
million in 2008.
While Ichiro might not have deserved to be the
best-paid player, he certainly earned less than he might
have if he’d sold his talent to the highest bidder, as
Rodriguez had. Ichiro was a bargain for the Mariners
because he valued loyalty over money, just as Ohtani and
other Japanese MLB players have chosen teams that
made them feel comfortable over teams that may have
paid them more.
In his latest one-year deal, Ichiro is making just
$750,000, with performance incentives that could double
the contract’s value. While that may seem like a paltry
sum, Ichiro is 44 years old and well past his prime. He hit
just .255 last season on 215 plate appearances in 136
games, 22 as a starter. Those are all career lows, except for
his batting average, which is second only to his .229 in
2015, his first season in the National League.
This year, back in the American League and familiar
Safeco Field, Ichiro might rebound slightly from last
year’s performance, but his days are numbered. Regard-
less, he remains as a reminder to Ohtani that it’s possible
for NPB players to exceed expectations and become one of
the best-performing, if not best-paid, players in the game.
The Ohtani Dilemma: Can fantasy accommodate a two-way star?
By Jake Seiner
The Associated Press
S
hohei Ohtani had general manag-
ers scrambling this winter with his
jump to the major leagues.
They weren’t alone. For folks who write
the code that tracks stats for fantasy
baseball websites, Ohtani’s two-way
talents have caused quite a conundrum.
At CBS fantasy baseball headquarters
in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Eric Chylin-
ski and his team nearly ran their markers
dry filling whiteboards with formulas and
ideas about the Japanese star. As director
of marketing and fantasy product,
Chylinski was among those charged with
solving the Shohei Ohtani dilemma.
“We’ve never had one player cause such
a shift in our workflow,” Chylinski said.
With his ace-level arsenal and prodi-
gious power, Ohtani has the tools to be-
come an unprecedented fantasy baseball
star — but only if the game can adapt to
accommodate him. The quandary faced by
Chylinski and others: How does a game
predicated on separating hitters from
pitchers account for a player who can do
both?
Ohtani signed with the Los Angeles
Angels in early December and formally
announced his intent to pitch and hit.
Two-way play isn’t unheard of in the
majors — Brooks Kieschnick did it with
the Brewers in 2003 and ’04, and Padres
catcher Christian Bethancourt experi-
mented with it last year — but nobody in
the fantasy baseball era has done both at a
level that would warrant interest from
fantasy players. Even homer-hitting
pitchers like Madison Bumgarner don’t
generate enough offensive power to
provide fantasy value, which is why
leagues usually disregard pitchers’
offensive stats entirely.
“With Ohtani, it’s different,” said
RotoWire.com president Peter Schoenke.
“He’s an international superstar. He could
be the two-way player everybody wants.”
Everyone except perhaps fantasy pro-
grammers.
Fantasy baseball — and the software
that supports it — is structured on the idea
that baseball has two types of players:
hitters and pitchers. Batters earn points
for stats like home runs, Runs Batted In
(RBI), and batting average. Pitchers
contribute with figures like wins, saves,
and Earned Run Average (ERA).
What happens if one player becomes a
worthwhile contributor on both sides?
“There are millions of lines of code, and
you’re putting in an exception for just one
player,” Schoenke said. “It gets tricky.”
At CBS, Chylinski and his staff spent
weeks weighing options, polling users, and
implementing new software. They decided
their best move was to rewrite the site’s
code to support Ohtani as a hitter or a
pitcher, but not both at the same time.
That means owners who draft Ohtani can
slot him as either a batter or a pitcher for
each scoring period, but they’ll only get
credit for his contributions on that side of
the ball. ESPN has implemented an
almost identical system.
“We explored all of the options we could
think of and solicited feedback from our
users as well as our analysts,” Chylinski
said. “In the end, the one player approach
was by far the most popular.”
There are drawbacks to CBS’ plan. If
Ohtani hits a home run and throws seven
scoreless innings on the same day,
frustrated owners will only get points for
one of those feats.
In leagues where owners set their
lineups only once per week, Ohtani’s
two-way value will be basically nullified,
since players won’t be able to move him
back and forth from their lineup to their
rotation on start days. Both CBS and
ESPN allow league commissioners to
manually adjust scoring if they want to
credit Ohtani for both, but fantasy owners
who spoke to The Associated Press didn’t
plan to do that.
“I think not designating whether Ohtani
is solely a pitcher or hitter is going to cause
a lot of chaos in my league, especially if a
team loses a close game because of him,”
said fantasy commissioner Roberto
Macias. Macias added that several owners
in his weekly league want to make Ohtani
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