Top Japanese players in Major League Baseball- MLB Feature Part 1
Baseball is a widely played game at a professional level internationally. Many countries have professional leagues where players compete for national honours. Countries in Asia, Latin America and even in Europe have well structured professional leagues.
Major League Baseball has the strongest and most certainly, the largest baseball of any of these leagues all over the world. It has been in existence for well over a century and has developed over time to come to the point it stands at right now.
The professional league in Japan, the Nippon Professional Baseball, is considered to the best in the world after the MLB. It has two sub leagues, the Pacific League and Central League, both comprising six teams each. The competition is highly competitive
and playing standard is quite high.
Major League teams bring players to their ranks from all over the world that have potential to perform well for them such as Cuba, Dominican Republic and Korea and players from the NBP are no exception to this.
This was, however, not always possible to acquire players from Japanese teams and in 1967, an agreement was reached between Japanese Baseball and Major League Baseball to allow players to switch leagues under certain conditions.
The rules were revisited in 1997 in order to close some loopholes that were utilised by Hideo Nomo to play in the Major League without qualifying as a free agent.
To date, there have been over 40 players from Japan who have played in the Majors and some of them have done extremely well, even made all time records in the Majors. We shall have a brief look at the achievements of these players in the Major League.
Takashi Saito is a right-handed relief pitcher who has been playing in the Major League for seven seasons now. He has a 21-15 winning record in the Majors and has a total of 84 career saves and 40 holds. Saito has posted a career ERA of
2.34 which would have been lower had he not posted a high 6.75 ERA in 2012.
He made his career high saves for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2007 with 39 saves. The same season, he posted his lowest single year ERA in Majors with 1.40. He has so far represented five different ball clubs in the Major League.
Takashi has enjoyed a successful career in Japan as a pitcher for the Yokohama BayStars. Drafted in 1991, the 42-year-old continued playing in Japan till 2005. In his 14-year-long career in the NBP, he posted an 87-80 winning record with a 3.80 ERA and also
made 40 saves. Saito was an All-Star on four occasions in the NBP.
Hideki Matsui played for Yomiuri Giants in Japan for 10 seasons before moving to the Major League. He was a successful hitter for his franchise and won many accolades in his home country winning three Japan Series and an NPB All-Star, nine
consecutive times.
He had a career average of .304 and an on-base percentage of .413. In 1268 games, he had 1390 hits, scored 656 runs, had 889 RBI’s and hit an impressive 332 home-runs in the NBP. These include 50 home-runs in 2002, his last season as player in Japan.
The 38-year-old has done pretty well in the Majors as well. In the 10 seasons he has played in, he has had a batting average of .282 and an on-base percentage of .360. He has batted in 760 runs and has gone long on 175 occasions. He was extremely productive
during the period between 2004 and 2006.
He has been an All-Star twice and also won the 2009 World Series with the New York Yankees where he was also the MVP with an amazing .349 batting average and .462 on-base percentage. He is currently a free agent and if he remains healthy, he should be having
more than one teams interested in him.
(To Be Continued in Part 2...)
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Continued in Part 2
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