NEIFI’s 日本野球機構 (NPB) Team Projections for 2016

NEIFI’s 日本野球機構 Team Projections for 2016

Introducing NEIFI’s NPB Team Projections for the 2016 season, which opens today.

What is included:

–All standard hitting and pitching performances, translated into NPB-E’s (Nippon Professional Baseball-Equivalents).

This includes affiliated MLB/MiLB performances, but also, for the cases of other gaijin, performances in Korean or Cuban professional leagues, expressed in NPB-relative values.

NEIFI also uses data from the Japanese developmental leagues (NPB minor leagues), and translates those performances into NPB-equivalents as well.

So, whether one is concerned with Yamaico Navarro (MiLB, MLB, KBO data) or Alfredo Despaigne (Cuba, NPB), Tetsuto Yamada (Japanese major and minor leagues), or Matt Hague (pretty much just MiLB), their performances in all leagues go into their projections.

What isn’t included:

–Defense. We simply have not yet taken the time to generate NPB defensive metrics based on available data (let alone, for example, Cuba-to-Japan defensive equivalents). We therefore assume NPB-average defense for players at their listed positions.

–Perfectly specific rosters.

Playing time is being estimated based on projected player quality, listed positions, and publicly available sources of rosters (NPB website, and also this very helpful Reddit thread).

Here are the results, as of opening day (3/25):

Pacific League			Central League
Team	Wins		Team	Wins
SoftBank	80.90		Yomiuri	77.47
Seibu	74.03		Hanshin	74.71
Nippon Ham	73.56		Yakult	71.70
Lotte	69.11		Hiroshima	70.96
Orix	67.58		Chunichi	67.78
Rakuten	63.81		Yokohama	66.37

 

This is a fairly bunched grouping, perhaps owing to our lack of defensive metrics, or perhaps simply representative of a tighter talent distribution (with only 12 teams, such a thing is far more likely to occur than it would be in MLB as a whole; however, it does occur in either the AL or NL from time to time, and the 2016 AL is a good example).

Top 10 Hitters

Using our overall offense metric, ABR, on the batting-average scale (.263 is league-average), relative to NPB:

Player	Team	Age	ABR
Yanagita, Yuki	SoftBank	28	.356
Yamada, Tetsuto	Yakult	24	.350
Balentien, Wladimir	Yakult	32	.336
Navarro, Yamaico	Lotte	29	.316
Hague, Matt	Hanshin	31	.309
Nakamura, Takeya	Seibu	33	.308
Tsutsugo, Yoshitomo	Yokohama	25	.306
Despaigne, Alfredo	Lotte	30	.306
Viciedo, Dayan	Chunichi	27	.302
Nakata, Sho	Nippon Ham	27	.301

 

Hague seems to be an ideal gaijin import, which NPB teams seem to view as their lifeblood. Yamaico Navarro has now played professionally in each of the Dominican Republic (DSL and DOWL), USA, Korea (KBO), and Japan (NPB). He has played primarily 2B in Korea the past two seasons; whether or not he could handle the infield in the US (or even Japan) is unknown. Interestingly, Navarro was also arrested in Japan last month after a bullet was found in his luggage at Okinawa airport. Yuki Yanagita and Tetsuto Yamada seem to be in a class all their own. Yanagita’s 2015 is effectively tied with Wladimir Balentien’s 2013 for single best offensive season under NEIFI’s NPB consideration (2010-present), and the next-best after those two lags by .029 points of ABR, or 17.4 runs per 600 PA. That’s the difference in offensive talent levels between Paul Goldschmidt and Mookie Betts, or Jose Bautista and Eric Hosmer. The Dayan Viciedo world tour begins its Japanese stint, and Viciedo has as good a chance as anyone of eventually competing in each of the big four (Cuba, US, Japan, Korea).

Top 10 SP:

Using an overall pitching metric we’ll term as “expected run average” (eRA), where league average is fixed at 4.00, relative to NPB:

Player	Team	Age	eRA
Otani, Shohei	Nippon Ham	22	2.49
Matsui, Yuki	Rakuten	21	2.90
Norimoto, Takahiro	Rakuten	26	3.11
van den Hurk, Rick	SoftBank	31	3.20
Fujinami, Shintaro	Hanshin	22	3.20
Senga, Kodai	SoftBank	23	3.22
Kaneko, Chihiro	Orix	33	3.26
Sugano, Tomoyuki	Yomiuri	27	3.28
Kishi, Takayuki	Seibu	32	3.29
Mikolas, Miles	Yomiuri	28	3.31

 

We wrote about Otani extensively for Fangraphs. For what it’s worth, Kenta Maeda would have ranked third on this list, were he still in NPB. As far as baseball world tours, Rick van den Hurk has now dominated in AAA, Korea, and Japan, and reached MLB after being born and raised in the Netherlands. (However, he can’t claim he was even the only RHP from the Netherlands competing in NPB last year. Loek Van Mil made appearances as well, though he spent most of the year with Rakuten’s farm team). Otani and Shintaro Fujinami have prototypical US pitcher bodies, as tall right-handers with fastballs in the mid-upper 90’s. It will be very interesting to watch the development of Yuki Matsui, who is a 5’8” lefty reportedly sitting mostly in the high 80’s. As an amateur, Matsui once struck out 22 batters in a national tournament (high-school) game, obliterating the decades-old previous record of 19, held by five pitchers. In his very next start in the same tournament, he struck out 19, in front of a mere 47,000 fans in Koshiem stadium (yes; 47k fans for a high school game). Matsui pitched as a closer for Rakuten last year, striking out 103 in 72 innings (36% of batters faced, and was pitching at age 19 until turning 20 in October). Though based on his track record—he was used mostly as an SP in the farm system—a return to starting seems possible.