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Q. Okay, here's a non-star from Japan. Can those guys play in the bigs?
A. Well, Kawasaki does make the All-Star game and the WBC there. But you know what we mean. It's like you sent LeBron and Kobe and Dwayne Wade to play in a higher league, and they did kinda good, and now you want to send Kris Humphries and see what happens.
My instinct was, "you gotta be kidding me. They'll knock the bat out of his hands. Go fight in your weight class, kid."
I mean, Nishioka came over and posted an ISO of .029 -- that is, in about half of a season, he had 50 hits, of which 45 were singles and the other 5 doubles. As Emperor Palpatine said, I don' want that in my sight. again.
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But then we siiigggghhhhhed and trudged over to the b-ref.com NPB player page, to look at all the little infielders. Just to check whether their ISO's have been miserable. As you know, your intuition on a position might be better than a computer's, but only after you've carefully uploaded the patterns. How has it worked out before?
Dr. D found, to his great surprise, that the ISO's of Japanese players aren't bad. Not at all. Not even for the littler guys.
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Q. ISO's aren't bad for NPB players? Like what?
A. We found 10 Japanese hitters (with half a season's games). This group had an ISO of .125, in 25,000 plate appearances.
.140 to .150 is ML average, and as a rule the 10 players were smaller guys. We're just saying: you can't knock the bat out of their hands.
In fact, of the ten players we looked at (Godzilla, Ichiro, Johjima, Iguchi, Fukudome, Taguchi, K-Mat, Iwamura, Shinjo and Nishioka) ... Ichiro had the lowest career ISO. Except for Nishioka's 68 games. Think about that for a minute. That's a little like saying that ten MLB players went to Japan, and Dustin Ackley had the least power.
So Dr. D was placing wayyyyyy too much weight on Nishioka's little 68-game travail.
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Q. Supposing that Kawasaki could defend himself at the plate? Would a 75-OPS+ shortstop be of any use?
A. Well, Capt. Jack is on his third iteration of that algorithm ... what was it that he paid Jack Wilson to provide that?
Old-school baseball men are partial to great defensive shortstops who are "pesky" with the bat. In my day the World Series teams lived on that fare ... Dave Concepcion, Bert Campaneris and all the rest of them.
Did you notice how tolerant and friendly the scouts sounded this time? :- )
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Awfully tough to replace Brendan Ryan with Kawasaki, considering the hair-fine territorial instincts of American players. Brendan Ryan has a great baseball face, you know?