From Los Angeles, where he took part in the Yankees’ undercover meeting with Masahiro Tanaka, Trey Hillman traveled to Japan. There, he and his wife Marie fulfilled a commitment to speak for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Organization, but Hillman also touched base with Japanese baseball contacts he had made during his five seasons managing the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.
In news-gathering mode, Hillman picked up some more information on Tanaka, the pitcher coveted by the Yankees and six other teams.
“He’s been messing with an American ball for a while,” said Hillman, whom the Yankees hired last November as a special assistant.
The adjustment from the Nippon Professional Baseball ball to that of Major League Baseball’s larger counterpart is one of myriad transitions required when a Japanese player makes the leap. Every nugget of information feels extra helpful in trying to master the difficult forecast when a player jumps from Asia to North America.
And therein lays the extra danger — the extra excitement, if you don’t have a stake in the matter — in the Yankees’ $175 million investment ($155 million over seven years for the player, plus the $20 million posting fee to the Rakuten Golden Eagles) in Tanaka.
“It’s pretty difficult to project them,” Pat Gillick, the Hall of Fame executive, said Saturday in a telephone interview.
Gillick took over as the Mariners’ general manager shortly before they won the posting for — and then signed — Ichiro Suzuki, who has become NPB’s most successful export and is on track to be Tanaka’s teammate, though the Yankees gladly would trade Ichiro if you or anyone else is interested. He posted a .353/.421/.522 slash line in eight years with the Orix Blue Wave and has a .319/.361/.414 line in 13 seasons with the Mariners and Yankees, so he downgraded from dominant to excellent.
You could argue, really, that in Ichiro and Hiroki Kuroda, the 2014 Yankees employ (for now, at least) the best hitter and best pitcher to come over from Japan, though Texas’ Yu Darvish is on a track to surpass Kuroda.
You know that Hideki Matsui shifted from an explosive power hitter with the Yomiuri Giants to a very good, line-drive guy with the Yankees. You know that Hideki Irabu shined only briefly before being done in by a poor work ethic and that Kei Igawa is one of the game’s all-time busts of any background.
Kazuo Matsui flamed out with the Mets, and Daisuke Matsuzaka, having disappointed greatly with the Red Sox, just signed a minor league deal with the Mets in the hopes of reviving his career. Hideo Nomo, the man who courageously broke through NPB’s oppressive system to open the doors for everyone who followed him, started brilliantly with the Dodgers, fizzled and enjoyed a few more surges and plummets before retiring.
“There are risks with pitchers from Japan,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman acknowledged this past week, after the Tanaka signing was official. “There’s a different ball, a different workload [starting pitchers work once a week in NPB and once every five games in MLB], a different strike zone, different opposing lineups. There’s a lot of risk associated.”
So why go here? Because every pitcher contains a level of risk, and the Yankees — desperate to contend again after missing the playoffs in 2013 — didn’t see any better answers as they looked internally to their own fallen prospects and externally to free agents such as Bronson Arroyo, Matt Garza, Ubaldo Jimenez and Ervin Santana.
“It’s not as much as a crapshoot on a pitcher as it is on a position player [from Japan],” said Gillick, a good friend of Cashman’s in the industry. “It’s harder with the hitters because of the competition and the pitchers in Japan. If you’re going to take a shot, it’s better to do so with a pitcher.”
Hillman managed Darvish on the Fighters. Darvish’s excellent freshman and sophomore campaigns with the Rangers haven’t surprised Hillman, he said. Hillman saw Darvish’s “perfect pitching frame” and “big hands,” he explained, and he envisioned a smooth switch. Hillman also managed Tanaka in one of the 2007 NPB All-Star Games and took note of his strong splitter and slider, although his command has improved dramatically since then.
I’ve yet to find an MLB employee who thinks Tanaka will flop. At worst, some scouts project him as a second starter. Gillick, now a senior advisor for the Phillies, watched Tanaka on video.
“I think [the Yankees] got a good one,” Gillick said.
Then again, you couldn’t find too many Matsuzaka skeptics back in the day (although you could for Igawa), and no one thought Nomo’s performance would fall off a cliff after just two years.
For sure, the trickiness of the cross-continental relocation is what intrigues us so much about Tanaka, and it’s not only the on-the-field stuff. How will he cope with a new language, a new culture, new travel? Hideki Matsui once told me how struck he was by the lack of manners exhibited by American drivers.
Tanaka’s work with the MLB ball displays his appreciation for the challenges coming his way. The challenge never will disappear, however, for teams trying to find the right fits overseas.