Archive for Masahiro Tanaka

The Back Problem

Full disclosure, I am a huge Los Angeles Dodgers homer, so it pains me to write this article, but it has to be done. Clayton Kershaw won’t be a top 25 starting pitcher in 2019, despite his tenacity, drive, and historical value. Whether people realize it or not, he was not a top 20 pitcher in 2018. Kershaw’s well-known diagnosis of herniated discs that he’s battled for several years and a physiologic phenomenon known as pain inhibition will limit his innings and his production. Here is the simple version.

Read the rest of this entry »

Note: As was the case in a previous analysis of Statcast measures and their correlation with power metrics for hitters, I owe a debt of gratitude to Alex Chamberlain. He did a lot of heavy lifting for this column, running the correlations and discussing interpretations with me.

It won’t be the first or last time, but I did a silly thing on Twitter. In announcing a pick for the Pitcher List Experts Mock, I decided to tout the player I chose by citing one of his achievements, as captured by a Statcast metric.

Fun fact: Trevor Williams has the 3rd-lowest avg. exit velocity allowed on flies and liners over the last two seasons (min. 400 BBE), behind only deGrom and Kluber. Just took him in Rd 21 of the #PLExpertsMock. @JustinMasonFWFB, you’re up!

— Al Melchior (@almelchiorBB) December 13, 2018

(Justin, by the way, made his pick very promptly.)
Read the rest of this entry »

And it’s evident you should now pay attention to him. Jeff Sullivan wrote about Miles Mikolas here — Sullivan does a good job of summarizing Mikolas’ skill set and how he’ll succeed stateside. Which is helpful. But, for fantasy purposes, it doesn’t help us a whole lot in terms of exactly what we should expect. Not that that’s Sullivan’s fault. He doesn’t keep a cross-league projection system in his brain.

So when you see a Tweet like this — from NEIFI Analytics, which FanGraphs has featured previously — it’s hard to ignore:

Congrats, Cardinals. Per NEIFI, Mikolas handily outperforms Jake Arrieta over next three seasons. Massive bargain, fantastic bet to be the most underrated FA of 2017 class.

— NEIFI Analytics (@NEIFIco) December 5, 2017

Then again, there are Tweets like this from ZiPS’ own Dan Szymborski:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you drafted Masahiro Tanaka and his elbow of broken parts, you knew there was risk. I was among the many that thought because of his “high floor” and expected ADP, he represented a nice little opportunity given the other available talent at that stage in the draft — a point well articulated by Paul Sporer in this piece. But while we knew he had a partially torn UCL, what wasn’t fully disclosed was that Tanaka had every intention of modifying his approach to hitters, saying, in effect, don’t expect much in the way of velocity this year. So it goes.

Read the rest of this entry »

In terms of evaluating starting pitchers for the fantasy baseball season, owners have patiently waited for Masahiro Tanaka to sign with a major-league team. Ballpark and competition matter when evaluating players, so now that Tanaka inked a seven-year, $155 million deal with the New York Yankees, we can proceed to the more important stage of determining probable performance and probable value.

Of course, the most obvious obstacle hindering most fantasy analysis regarding Tanaka is the switch from the Nippon Professional Baseball league to the major leagues. The right-hander twirled a sparkling 1.27 ERA in his final season in Japan, but it’s unclear how that will translate to the American League. Furthermore, how do we know where to draft him and what kind of peripheral statistics can we expect? He’s bound to get glossed up by the hype machine in the coming months, especially since he will be wearing pinstripes, but fantasy owners realize they must trim away the fat to get at some core truth.

I’m not going to pretend I can project Tanaka’s overall performance in 2014. No matter what, he’ll remain kind of an enigma heading into the season. However, I do feel we can glean some important relational information by comparing him to how owners treated Yu Darvish when he stormed the league a couple seasons ago.

Read the rest of this entry »