Brad Strauss, Indy-A Star

A player I did not mention in my last post on the Best Foreign Players in CPBL History is Brad Strauss. He led the Taiwan Major League (“TML”) with a .387 batting average in 1999, his third and final TML season.

Strauss is the rarest of rare birds: an American player who found success in Asia, who did not play even one game in the MLB minor league system. He played 11 seasons in North America entirely in the Independent-A Leagues.

He came out of Catawba College, a school that more famously produced Johnny Temple and more recently Jerry Sands. A big 1996 season for the Minot Mallards of the fly-by-night Prairie League (it lasted only three 80-game seasons) in which he batted .365 and blasted 27 HR in 79 games somehow caught the attention of a TML team.

Just as mysteriously, Strauss left the TML after his league-leading 1999 campaign for a presumably much more modest Atlantic League paycheck. He played eight years in the Atlantic League, mostly for the Camden Riversharks for whom he led the best of the Indy-A Leagues with a .331 batting average in 2003.

Clearly, Strauss could hit a little. Unfortunately, while he likely earned some money playing in the TML and wowed some Taiwanese baseball fans, it’s just about impossible for anyone who can’t read Chinese to find those stats and learn of his exploits. There isn’t a lot of renown for even the greatest of Indy-A stars, although we here at Burly’s Baseball Musings like to shine a light on forgotten baseball stars when we can.

Slugging It Out in Taiwan: The Best Foreign Hitters in CPBL History

This the first revised iteration of a post on the most successful foreign hitters in the history of Taiwan’s CPBL. The CPBL recognizes stats from a rival league, the Taiwan Major League (“TML”), which operated for six years before merging with the CPBL after the 2002 season. However, the CPBL does not publish TML stats and neither does baseball-reference.com.

Nearly all of the best foreign hitters in CPBL history played in the CPBL in its early years between 1990 and 2005, and many of the best foreign players jumped to the TML for more money. This makes it hard for someone like me with no working knowledge of Mandarin Chinese to find the TML stats. I have now revised this post based on Google Translate versions of Taiwanese wikipedia pages.

After about 2010, CPBL teams, following serious contraction in the number of teams, quite reasonably decided that foreign starting pitchers were more valuable to them than position players and relief pitchers, in no small part because it was easier for the foreign pitchers they signed to adjust to CPBL baseball right away than it was for foreign position players to do so.

With the expansion Wei Chuan Dragons starting CPBL major league play in 2021, creating a need for 25% more major league position players, CPBL teams all signed foreign position players for the 2022 season, although none of them has had success so far. The TSG Hawks will start CPBL major league play in 2024, meaning the CPBL will need to find another roster-full of major league position players.

Rob over at CPBL STATS has opined many times that he still thinks it doesn’t make sense for teams to sign foreign position players because pitchers are more of sure thing of proven value. I think it makes sense for CPBL teams to sign position players now, at least to play at the minor league level. I also think teams will have to sign position players when the TSG Hawks start major league play because you can’t add 50% more position players in five years and not have a serious diminution of talent unless you expand the player base beyond domestic Taiwanese position players.

Without further ado, here are my lists.

Batting Average (1,900 At-Bat Minimum)

1. Sandy Guerrero .333 (1,984 At-Bats)
2. Luis Iglesias .318
3. Angel Gonzalez .314 (1,964 At-Bats)
4. Francisco Laureano .306
5. Leo Garcia .300
6. Sil Campusano .290

Panamanian Luis Iglesias and Dominicans Sandy Guerrero, Francisco Laureano, Leo Garcia, Sil Campusano and Angel Gonzalez are the only foreign players to reach my 1,900 career at-bats threshold with certainty. Luis Iglesias had the most productive Taiwanese baseball career of any foreign hitter. He played seven years in the CPBL for the now-defunct Mercuries Tigers and then finished his Taiwanese career with two seasons in the TML. His career batting average in the CPBL of .318 matches his career Taiwan batting average, so it seems clear that the level of play in the TML was roughly equal to the CPBL, thanks mainly to allowing each team to sign a lot more foreign players than CPBL roster limits.

Iglesias had a good year with the bat in the Class A Sally League in 1987 at age 20, but his offensive production dropped in the Class A Florida State League in 1988; and his MLB organization, the Phillies, dropped him. He played for one of the last independent teams in an MLB-system minor league, the Miami Miracle, in 1989 and then signed with the Mercuries Tigers for the CPBL’s inaugural 1990 season at the still young age of 23. He did nothing but hit in the CPBL’s early days, while splitting his time between SS and 3B. His .331 batting average led the league in 1991.

Francisco Laureano, Leo Garcia and Angel Gonzalez played five successful seasons in the CPBL starting in 1992 and then played for two seasons in the TML. Leo Garcia got cups of coffee with the Cincinnati Reds in 1987 and 1988 and was the Reds’ starting AAA centerfielder for seven years before joining the CPBL’s Mercuries Tigers in 1992.

Angel Gonzalez led the CPBL with batting averages of .360 and .354 in 1994 and 1995. Sandy Guerrero played four years in the CPBL followed by two in the TML.

Sil Campusano played briefly for the Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies before playing three seasons in the CPBL followed by three seasons in the TML.

Dominican Luis De Los Santos batted .362 across three CPBL seasons from 1994-1996 for the Brother Elephants. His .375 batting average led the league in 1996, and he finished second in batting average in each of 1994 and 1995. His CPBL performance earned De Los Santos an NPB shot in 1997, where he flopped for the Yomiuri Giants; but he returned to Taiwan in 1998, where he led the TML with a .357 batting average. De Los Santos batted .353 over five seasons in Taiwan (634 hits in 1,796 AB). He also played parts of three MLB seasons for the Kansas City Royals and Detroit Tigers before going to Taiwan and had a big year in the KBO at age 34 after he left Taiwan.

Except for De Los Santos, all of these players played up the middle, providing a great deal of value to their Taiwanese teams. De Los Santos could just plain hit.

Home Runs

1. Luis Inglesias 164
2. Sil Campusano 96
3. Luis De Los Santos 88
4. Leo Garcia 77
5. Corey Powell 75
6. George Hinshaw 68
7. Tilson Brito 66
8. Francisco Laureano 65
9. Angel Gonzalez 64
10. Ted Wood 61

Luis Iglesias hit 120 CPBL HR, including a record-setting 31 in 1996, and 44 HR in the TML. He also hit the first Taiwan Series home run, although the Mercuries Tigers lost the game 2-1 to the original Wei Chuan Dragons.

Corey Powell hit 25 HR in each of his three seasons in the TML.

George Hinshaw played briefly for the San Diego Padres and spent a season with NPB’s Chunichi Dragons before starting a four-year CBPL career at age 34 in 1994. He may also have played a season or two in the TML.

Tilson Brito played briefly for the Toronto Blue Jays and the Oakland A’s before having much greater success in South Korea’s KBO and the CPBL. His 33 HR in 2007 set a new CPBL record.

Ted Wood had three cups of coffee with the San Francisco Giants and Montreal Expos before playing three seasons with the Brother Elephants starting in 1997. He led the CPBL with a lusty .373 batting average in 1997. His strong performance got him a shot in the KBO in 2000, where he finished his pro career.

RBIs

1. Luis Iglesias 550
2. Luis De Los Santos 365
3. Sil Campusano 348
4. Francisco Laureano 346
5. Leo Garcia 316
6. Sandy Guerrero 289
7. Angel Gonzalez 272
8. George Hinshaw 246
9. Ted Wood 241
10. Tilson Brito 234

Runs Scored

1. Luis Iglesias 436
2. Sil Campusano 382
3. Frank Laureano 334
4. Leo Garcia 326
5. Sandy Guerrero 308
6. Luis De Los Santos 297
7. Angel Gonzalez 291
8. Ted Wood 207
9. Corey Powell 207

Stolen Bases

1. Bernie Tatis 147
2. Sil Campusano 122
3. Lonnie Goldberg 110
4. Angel Gonzalez 100
5. Leo Garcia 84
6. Cesar Hernandez 82
7. Freddy Tiburcio 68
8. Sandy Guerrero 67

Bernie Tatis played parts of four seasons in the CPBL but only regularly in 1997 and 1998, when he stole 71 and then 65 bases at the ages of 35 and 36. Clearly, he was great at reading pitchers’ moves and getting a good jump.

Lonnie Goldberg played three seasons in the TML after playing in the Independent-A Northeast League.

Cesar Hernandez is another former Cincinnati Reds outfielder. He signed with the Uni-President Lions in 1995 at the still young age of 28 and played four years for the Uni-Lions.

OF Freddy Tiburcio played six seasons for the Brother Elephants starting in 1990. His .318 batting average was second best in the circuit in 1991.

As you can see, Tilson Brito was the only foreign hitter to have much of a CPBL career after 2005, although former Boston Red Sox 3B Wilton Veras did finish 3rd in 2009 with a .360 batting average.

After 2010, foreign hitters nearly disappeared from the CPBL. Jim Negrich in 2014 and 2015 was the last foreign position player to play regularly in the CPBL until 2021, when the expansion Wei Chuan Dragons got their best offensive production from former MLBer Rosell Herrera. However, Herrera missed a lot of games with injuries and didn’t hit with much power, and the Dragons elected not to re-sign him for 2022.

In the early days of the CPBL, many foreign hitters had one or two big seasons. The best was Jay Kirkpatrick‘s 1998 campaign for the Sinon Bulls. He was the CPBL’s first Triple Crown winner, batting .387 with 31 HR and 101 RBIs, a feat not matched until current Nippon Ham Fighter Wang Po-Jung won the Triple Crown in 2017.

Also, in 1998, 37 year old former Houston Astro Ty Gainey finished second in all the Triple Crown categories — .376 batting average, 21 HR and 83 RBI.

Former Milwaukee Brewer Juan Castillo led the CPBL with a .326 batting average in 1992.

3B/OF Melvin Mora had the best MLB career after playing in the CPBL. After becoming a minor league free agent after seven seasons in the Astros’ system and coming off a light-hitting season at AAA in 1997, Mora apparently did not receive a minor league contract offer to his liking, because he ended up signing with the Mercuries Tigers to start the 1998 season. He batted .335 for the Mercuries Tigers in 44 games and was signed by New York Mets in late July, going on to greater MLB success as a Baltimore Oriole.

Given the late in career improvement as a hitter and the era in which Mora played, one must suspect that Vitamin S may have shot his career forward, as it did for the next player. Before going on to hit five MLB HR and 357 NPB HR, Alex Cabrera batted .325 with 18 HR in 1999 for the Chinatrust Whales, Cabrera’s age 27 season.

Former Red Sox and Oriole slugger Sam Horn blasted 31 HR in 1997, setting the all-time TML record.

No article on foreign hitters in the CPBL would be complete without mention of Manny Ramirez‘s half season in 2013 for the EDA Rhinos. The possible future Hall of Famer (PEDs) batted .352 and clubbed eight HR in 49 games before returning for a last shot in AAA baseball. The Rhinos offered to double his monthly salary to $50,000 if he would stay, because he had had a tremendous impact on CBPL attendance. However, Manny was just trying to get some quality professional at-bats to show that he still had something left in the tank at age 41 since his real goal was to return to MLB.

Yomar Flande, CPBL’s Answer to Robert Suarez

One of the more interesting pro baseball stories this season was the Fubon Guardians’ Yomar Flande. Flande was a 29 year rookie to professional baseball at any level in 2021, and he pitched effectively in a pretty good league.

I wrote about Robert Suarez earlier this year as possibly the best baseball player the vast majority of baseball fans in the United States had never heard of. If anyone in the U.S. has heard of Robert Suarez, besides whackadoodles like me, it’s because mlbtraderumors.com published a post about Suarez as a possible MLB sign this off-season. Note that Burly beat mlbtraderumors by 28 days — I have to take credit when I get it right for all the ones I get wrong — mlbtraderumors reported Suarez signing with the Hanshin Tigers on 12/13/2020 — they’re good at what they do.

Like Suarez, Yomar Flande is somebody the MLB system inexplicably missed, even for a brief Dominican Summer League/Rookie League look. Like Suarez, Flande is almost certainly the younger brother of a former MLB player. Yomar Conception Flande has to be the younger brother of Yohan Conception Flande, a pitcher who went 3-9 for the Denver Rockies from 2014 to 2016 and lasted all of 13 ineffective starts in the KBO, also in 2016. Baseball Reference does not list where in the Dominican Republic Yomar was born, but I would bet dollars to donuts that it is in or around El Seibo, where Yohan was born.

The back story per CPBL STATS is that Yomar Flande was recommended to Fubon by marginal major leaguer/Asian Ace Henry Sosa, who I have to assume saw Yomar pitch semi-pro ball in the Dominican Republic. Flande had been pitching in the semi-pro Inter-County Baseball League in Ontario, Canada. I am marginally embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of the Intercounty Baseball League (have you?) because it is Canada’s oldest semi-pro league and a significant number of Canadian future MLBers played in it.

Sosa recommended Flande, and Flande has a 95 mph fastball, which recommends itself. So, Fubon signed him and proved Sosa right. When you pitch like Sosa has done in Taiwan the last couple of seasons, you take his word seriously.

Rob at CPBL STATS seemed to think that Fubon signed Flande solely for organizational depth, but the 2021 season, where Covid meant that higher profile foreign replacement pitchers could not be brought in quickly, allowed Yomar a major league shot at the start of CPBL’s second half. Yomar ran with it.

In half a season, Flande pitched 58.1 innings with a 4.01 ERA and a pitching line of 48 hits, three HR, 28 BB and 62 K. He was a little wild, which showed in his ERA, but the other numbers are terrific for a 29 year old rookie pitcher jumping into what I consider to be a AA league. Yomar pitched at least two innings in 16 of his 26 appearances (five starts), which means a lot in a world of pro baseball where relief pitching of less than two innings per is becoming the majority of all pitcher effort.

One would have to think that Fubon would be crazy not to bring Flande back for another season in Taiwan. Fubon could probably sign Flande to a 2022 contract paying him $10K-$12K a month for minor league service and $17K-$18K for major league service — as a 29 year old foreign rookie in the CPBL who pitched the way Flande did, his next best option is Mexico’s Summer League at around $8,000 a month to start for much shorter season.

I love the stories of late bloomers who finally make good. Hard throwers who finally find command are classic late bloomers. Dazzy Vance is perhaps the patron saint of this kind of pitcher. I sure hope that Flande gets another CPBL season in 2022 to show what he can or cannot do.

The Best Foreign Pitchers in CPBL History: 2021-2022 Update

This is the post-2021 season update on an article I first published four years ago. 

WINS

1.      Osvaldo (Ozzy) Martinez  108-85     MiLB, WiL Stats and more MiLB Stats

2.     Mike Loree                97-70     MiLB, Indy-A stats

3.     Jonathan Hurst        76-52     MLB, NPB, MiLB Stats

4.      Jose Nunez                62-30*     MLB, NPB, KBO, etc Stats

5.      John Burgos             58-34     MiLB, Indy-A Stats

6.      Mark Kiefer             55-27     MLB, MiLB, KBO stats

7. Bryan Woodall 54-47

8.      Don August               52-48*   MLB, MiLB Stats

9.     Joe Strong                  47-33     MLB, MiLB, Indy-A Stats

10.     Orlando Roman       44-28     MiLB, NPB Stats, WiL

11.     Gabriel “Gab” Ozuna     43-39     MiLB Stats

Martinez, Loree and Hurst are the only long-term veterans among pitchers I could find in my search of the CPBL website.  Martinez pitched nine seasons, Loree has now pitched nine, and Hurst pitched seven.  Loree will be returning for at least one more season in 2022.  Burgos had a terrific 4.5 seasons, Kiefer had four terrific seasons, and Nunez had an even-better-than-either three seasons.  Kiefer won 34 KBO games over three seasons later in his career.

Mike Loree is the most successful foreign pitcher currently pitching in CPBL or since Oswaldo Martinez’s and Jonathan Hurst’s CPBL careers ended after the 2005 season.  Loree had a hard luck 2021 campaign, going 7-9 in spite of a 3.03 ERA, the circuit’s fourth best (there were only seven qualifiers, as relief pitching is overtaking the game everywhere).  Loree will almost certainly return to Taiwan for another CPBL season in 2022. I was disappointed Mike didn’t win his 100th CPBL game this year, but he’s likely to do it in 2022, when he will also likely set the all-time CPBL career strikeout record.

Bryan Woodall broke onto the all-time wins list with a comeback season to remember. Woodall went a dreadful combined 4-21 in 2019-2020 with a combined ERA close to 6.00. I thought the expansion Wei-Chuan Dragons were making a big mistake bringing Woodall back for his age 34 season. Bryan sure proved me wrong. He went 12-5 for an expansion team, getting the run support Mike Loree didn’t, and Woodall’s 2.90 ERA was third best in league. Woodall’s strikeout rate was not impressive, but he cut down on the hits and home runs that plagued him in 2019-2020. I still think Woodall will regress to his mean in 2022, but it’s all but certain the Dragons will bring him back for another season after his 2021 success.

Joe Strong was a 37 year old MLB rookie in 2000 for the Florida Marlins, but he pitched better in the Show in limited use in 2001.  He pitched professionally through his age 41 season.

* Jose Nunez and Don August both later pitched a season in Taiwan’s other major league, the Taiwan Major League (TML).  Don August only won 18 games in the CPBL, but he then went went 34-30 in the TML, the same as his career MLB major league record.  The CPBL counts TML stats for purposes of career records, but unfortunately does not publish the TML records on its website, making it very difficult for a non-Mandarin speaker to obtain these records.  Thanks to Rob over at CPBL STATS for providing the TML stats necessary to make this post as accurate as possible.

ERA   (650 IP)

1.      Jose Nunez             2.18

2.     Jonathan Hurst        2.56

3.     Joe Strong               2.71

4.     Mark Kiefer              2.82

5.     John Burgos             2.84

6.     Gab Ozuna               3.16

7.     Osvaldo Martinez    3.20

7.     Enrique Burgos     3.20     MLB, MiLB Stats 

9.     Mike Loree             3.35

10.  Don August              3.49

11.    Orlando Roman     3.78

I set the 650 IP limit because I wanted to include Jose Nunez (687 CPBL innings, but he topped 700 with TML innings included) and Orlando Roman (691).  Nunez won 56 games over three seasons, before moving on to greener Japanese NPB pastures.  As mentioned above, he returned to pitch in the TML in 1998, during that competitor league’s six-year history before it folded/merged into the CPBL after the 2002 season.

In this extreme hitter-friendly era of the CPBL, Mike Loree’s and Orlando Roman’s higher ERAs are at least equivalent to what the best foreign pitchers accomplished in different, less offensive eras than the one the prevailed until the CPBL softened its baseballs last off-season.  I base this claim on their W-L records, the fact that Loree has been arguably the league’s best pitcher in each of his first six full CPBL seasons, and the fact that Roman used the CPBL as a springboard to a four-year NPB career, where he won a total of 18 games and saved another six, before returning to CPBL in 2016.  Alas, Roman’s CBPL career ended after the 2017 season, but he continued to pitch in Puerto Rico’s winter league past his 40th birthday.

STRIKEOUTS

1.     Ozzie Martinez      1,286

2.     Mike Loree             1,215

3.     Jonathan Hurst      779

4.     Enrique Burgos      736

5.     Michael “Mike” Garcia      651     MLB, MiLB, KBO etc Stats

6. Bryan Woodall 610    

7. Orlando Roman    564

8.     Jose Nunez            545

9.     John Burgos          541

10.     Mark Kiefer           532

11.    Gab Ozuna           508

Enrique Burgos had some of the best strikeout stuff CPBL had ever seen, but it didn’t translate into his W-L record.  He finished his CPBL career an even 36-36.

Ozzy Martinez is the CPBL’s career strikeouts leader.  Mike Loree is now a knocking-at-the-door second, and all-time CPBL wins leader Pan Wei-lun is currently third with 1,149 careers K’s (to go with his 146 career wins).

SAVES

1.     Mike Garcia             124

2.     Ryan Cullen           70     MiLB, Indy-A, WiL Stats

3.     Brad Thomas        59     MLB, NPB, KBO etc Stats

3.     Brandy Vann         59     MiLB, Indy-A Stats

5.     Alfornio (“Al”) Jones     50     MLB, MiLB Stats

6.   Dario Veras           49     MLB, MiLB, KBO etc Stats 

6.   Tony Metoyer       49     MiLB, Indy-A Stats

Mike Garcia is far and away the best foreign closer in CPBL history, and certainly one of the best in league history overall, second only in career saves to Yueh-Ping Lin.  He pitched five seasons in Taiwan (1996-1998, 2004-2005) in between which he was a 31 year old MLB rookie for the 1999 Pittsburgh Pirates.  His career CPBL ERA is an even 2.00.  He last pitched professionally at age 39.

Ryan Cullen pitched 3+ seasons in Taiwan, saving a then record-setting 34 games for the Brother Elephants in 2010 and recording a career CPBL ERA of 1.60.  Cullen is best remembered for his final CPBL game, when he threw a pitch, felt pain in his throwing shoulder, and walked off the mound and off the field without motioning to the dugout and waiting for the manager to take him out of the game.  He was released the next day.

Cullen said he didn’t intend to disrespect anyone, but it does not appear that he ever played professional baseball again.  Since he was only 32 and still pitching effectively at the time of his release, I suspect that he either just decided that he’d had enough of pro ball or the injury he suffered that caused him to walk off the field was more serious than it looked in the video of it I’ve seen. People are more sympathetic when you grab your arm and fall on the ground like you’ve just been shot.

Brad Thomas is an Aussie who pitched professionally in at least seven countries on four continents, concluding his baseball odyssey with 2.5 seasons in Taiwan.  Tony Metoyer pitched parts of seven seasons in the CPBL, where he was used as both a closer and spot starter.

Brandy Vann was a former 1st round MLB draft pick by the Angels.  He had good stuff, but not enough command to reach the MLB majors.  He pitched three years in the CPBL, followed by two more in the TML.  Vann may well be the first foreign player signed by a CPBL team out of an Independent-A league, something that happens all the time today.

2021 saw the return of foreign relievers to CPBL in a big way. Junichi Tazawa saved a second best in league 30 games, and Bradin Hagens saved nine.  Werner Madrigal saved 16 games for the 7-11 Uni-Lions as recently as 2015, and in 2014 Miguel Mejia saved a record-setting 35 games and posted a 1.24 ERA for the Lamigo Monkeys, although that record was bested in 2017 by Chen Yu-Hsun, who recorded 37 saves for a Lamigo Monkeys team that set a league record for wins in a season.  However, a five-year stretch followed in which CPBL teams decided (for the most part correctly IMHO) that starting pitchers are just too valuable for their three available foreign player roster spaces, even though there are almost always some good relievers in the Mexican League to choose from.

2021 featured an expansion team that figured it might squeeze out a few more wins if it signed a legitimate foreign closer like Tazawa, and Covid (and the quarantine period for people entering Taiwan) meant that it was hard to timely find replacements for foreign starters who weren’t effective as starters, and so CPBL teams used these already on-hand foreigners as relievers with generally greater success.

It’s hard for a foreign player to have a long career in the CPBL.  If the player has a bad year or even a bad half-season (most foreigners initially receive half-season contracts), he’s too expensive to keep around and too easily replaced.  There are a lot of players of the age and talent level to whom the CPBL salary scale is highly appealing, so CPBL teams can pick and choose their foreign players. 

That was particularly true in 2020 with no minor league, Atlantic League or Mexican League baseball due to Covid-19 and was still generally true in 2021, although as mentioned above it was harder to replace players in season in 2021 due to the Covid quarantine.  CPBL teams also showed a willingness to spend more money on the best available foreign pitchers starting in 2020, which means the league’s teams may be able to hold on to some of the better pitchers they signed this season going forward.

If a foreign player has a great full season or two, he typically moves on to NPB, KBO or back to MLB AAA.  League ace Jose De Paula will return for his age 34 season in 2022, but I fully expect the CPBL’s second ace Brock Dykxhoorn to return to the KBO in 2022 following a great season at age 26 and the 2021 KBO success of 2020 CPBLers Ariel Miranda and Ryan Carpenter.

In its early days, the CPBL appears to have recruited heavily among Latin American players who put up successful seasons in the winter leagues, which makes a lot of sense, since the Latin American winter leagues are pretty good and pay accordingly.  After the CPBL season expanded gradually from 90 to 120 games, fewer Latin players may have been willing to play in Taiwan, because it interferes with their ability to play a full season of winter league ball in their home countries.  However, the 2020 season saw the return of Latin American pitchers in a big way.  Jose De Paula, Henry Sosa, Esmil Rodgers, Ariel Miranda, Lisalverto Bonilla and Manny Banuelos were all major contributors to CPBL teams in 2020/2021.  I tend to think that players from Latin American countries are a good bet for Asian baseball because they have already had the experience of playing baseball in a foreign country at a high level by virtue of having played in the MLB system.

In recent years, the independent-A Atlantic League has been a major source for CPBL teams looking for in-season pitching help, and the (summer) Mexican League has been a prime source particularly for off-season signings. 

Slugging It Out in Japan: Best Foreign Hitters in NPB History: 2021-2022 Update

In the past several years, I’ve written a couple of posts on the all-time leaders among foreign hitters in the history of Japan’s NPB.  The articles have met with a positive response, so I am updating them whenever new or more complete information comes to me.  This iteration adds stolen base leaders, and has been updated to include Wladimir Balentien’s performance through the 2021 season

BATTING AVERAGE (4,000 ABs)

1.  Leron Lee .320

2.  Boomer Wells .317

3.  Wally Yomamine .311

4.  Leon Lee .308

5.  Alex Cabrera .303

6.  Alex Ramirez .301

BATTING AVERAGE (3,000 ABs)

1.  Bobby Rose .325

2.  Matt Murton .310

3.  George Altman .309

I received a comment several years ago arguing that Sadaharu Oh and Isao Harimoto should be treated as “foreign” players for NPB purposes, because neither was a Japanese citizen, and they were treated as “foreign” by their teams during their careers.  Oh was born in Japan to a Taiwanese (Chinese) father and a Japanese mother at a time when only the sons of Japanese fathers were automatically treated as citizens.  Instead, Oh was and remains a Taiwanese citizen.  Harimoto was an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, who nevertheless was and remains a Korean citizen.  Questions about who is and is not a “foreign” player for NPB raises difficult questions about the way Japan treats people of foreign ancestry born and raised in Japan.

I personally don’t consider Oh or Harimoto to be “foreign” NPB players, and I have left them off my lists again.  You can make your own decisions regarding whether they should be considered “foreign” NPBers.  [Wikipedia lists seven Korean Zainichi players good enough to merit mention.]

Leron Lee was not, as his wikipedia page suggests, the first American player to go to Japan during the prime of his professional career.  However, he was the first first major leaguer of his ability and past MLB success to go to Japan before his age 30 season.  Lee is not just the best career hitter among players from the Americas, he has the highest NPB batting average of any player with at least 4,000 at-bats, and he had almost 5,000 NPB at-bats, so it was no fluke based on a small data set.

Leon Lee was Leron’s little brother and the father of former MLBer Derrek Lee.  Pops never played in MLB, but he was nearly as great an NPB player as his big brother, and that’s saying something.

Wally Yonamine, a Nisei (Japanese American) from Hawaii, was the first foreign player to play in NPB after the Second World War, breaking in with the Yomuiri Giants, far and away NPB’s most popular team, in 1951.  Yonamine was sort of the poster boy for a class of Japanese American athletes during the era between about 1920 and 1950 who were famed on the West Coast and Hawaii for their abilities on both the baseball diamond and the gridiron in semi-pro leagues.

Yonamine was really an exceptional athlete.  He was 5’9″ and 180 lbs, fast and tough.  He was the first Asian American to play pro football that I am aware of, playing for the San Francisco 49ers in 1947, the team’s second season in the All-American Football Conference.  He played in 12 of the team’s 14 games that year and started three times.  He ran for 74 yards on 19 carries, caught three passes for 40 yards, ran back an interception for 20 yards and returned a total of nine punts and kick-offs.  He quit football after injuring himself playing baseball the next summer.

In his only season of minor league baseball, he hit .335 as a catcher in the Class C Pioneer League at age 25 in 1950.  At that age, his MLB chances were slim, so he went to Japan in 1951, where he mostly played outfield.  He had a major impact on NPB, bringing his tougher, more aggressive American style of base running.  He is one of only three only foreign player in the NPB Hall of Fame (NPB’s first 300 game winner Victor Starfin was born in Russia but grew up in Japan after his family fled the Russian Revolution), something I’ll comment on below.

HITS

1.  Alex Ramirez 2,017

2. In-cheon Paek 1,831

3. Tuffy Rhodes 1,792

4. Leron Lee 1,579

5.  Leon Lee 1,436

6.  Bobby Marcano 1,418

7.  Boomer Wells 1,413

8.  Alex Cabrera 1,368

9.  Wally Yonamine 1,337

10.  Shosei Go 1,326

11.  Jose Fernandez 1,286

12.  Bobby Rose 1,275

13.  John Sipin 1,124

14.  Roberto Barbon 1,123

15.  Daikan Yoh (Dai-Kang Yang) 1,091

16.  Ta-Feng Chen (Yasuaki Taiho) 1,089.

17.  Matt Murton, 1020.

Before I wrote the original piece in 2014, I’d never heard of Bobby Marcano, John Sipin or Roberto Barbon (or if I have I’ve long since forgotten).  Marcano hit .317 with an .857 OPS in the AAA Pacific Coast League at the age of 23, but elected to sign with an NPB team the next season.  I don’t know anything about his story, but it was apparently a good move, as he had a very successful 11 career in Japan playing mostly 2B.

John Sipin got into 68 games for the expansion San Diego Padres in 1969.  A couple of big years in the Pacific Coast League at ages 23 and 24, and off he went to Japan for a nine-year NPB career.  He also mostly played 2B.  Both Marcano and Sipin played most of their NPB careers in the 1970’s.

Roberto Barbon was a light-hitting (.241 career NPB batting average) middle infielder from Cuba who played 11 seasons in Japan starting in 1955 at the age of 22.  His defense was probably very good for him to last so long, and his 308 career NPB stolen bases is the record for Gaijin players, at least according to some sources.  Here is a NY Times article about Barbon, who still lives in Japan and is involved in baseball.

Daikan Yoh is a Taiwanese player who was so good as a youngster that he was recruited to play high school ball in Japan and never left.  Because he played high school ball in Japan, he does not count as a foreign player for roster limit purposes.

HOME RUNS

1.  Tuffy Rhodes 464

2. Alex Ramirez 380

3. Alex Cabrera 357

4.  Wladimir Balentien  301

5.  Leron Lee 283

6.  Boomer Wells 277

6.  Ta-Feng Chen (Yasuaki Taiho) 277

8.  Leon Lee 268

9.  Ralph Bryant 259

NPB teams pay their relatively high-priced foreign position players to hit home runs, so it isn’t particularly surprising that eight foreign players have topped 250 career home runs in NPB.  Ralph Bryant hit a lot of home runs and also set strike out records, striking out 204 times in 127 games played in 1993, in his eight year NPB career.  Wladimir Balentien is the most recent in a now long line of foreign sluggers to top the 250 home run mark. Balentien has been dreadful for the SoftBank Hawks in 2020 and 2021, but he may return to NPB in 2022 if SoftBank signed him to deal of more than two years. If he returns, he’s on the cusp with 1,001 career NPB hits and 794 RBIs.

RBIs

1.  Alex Ramirez 1,272

2.  Tuffy Rhodes 1,269

3.  Alex Cabrera 949

4. Leron Lee 912

5.  Boomer Wells 901

6.  Leon Lee 884

7.  Bobby Marcano 817

8.  Bobby Rose 808

RUNS

1.  Tuffy Rhodes 1,100

2.  Shosei Go 880

3.  Alex Ramirez 866

4. In-cheon Paek 801

5.  Leron Lee 786

6.  Alex Cabrera 754

NPB teams pay foreign hitters to drive in runs rather than score them, which is why the RBI totals are so much more impressive than the runs scored totals.

STOLEN BASES

1.  Shosei Go  381

2.  Roberto Barbon 308

3.  In-cheon Paek 212

4.  Wally Yonamine  163

5.  Daikan Yoh  140

6.  Larry Raines 114

As I’ve written before, it is no small task to determine who is “foreign” for NPB purposes and who isn’t.  At the time Shosei Go joined Japanese professional ranks in 1937, Taiwan was a Japanese colony, so Go was not considered a “foreign” player during his playing career.  However, as an ethnic Taiwanese born and raised in Taiwan (he attended high school there), he seems more “foreign” to me than Victor Starrfin, who lived in Japan since before his second or third birthday.  Go also seems more foreign than Hiroshi Ohshita, an ethnic Japanese who was probably born in Kobe, Japan but spent part of his childhood, including high school, in colonial Taiwan, but then attended Meiji University, one of Japan’s big six college baseball programs.

Another thing my original research in compiling these lists pointed out is just how much of a fungible commodity NPB teams apparently consider foreign players to be.  A total of fewer than 20 players made any of my six lists.  There are easily more than four times this many foreign players who were great in NPB from between three to seven seasons who didn’t stick around long enough to make my lists.

Since most foreign players are at least 26 to 28 years old in their first NPB season and often quite a bit older, a lot of them simply didn’t have much left by the time they reached their mid-30’s.  However, it’s just as true that in a majority of cases it only took one bad year, even after many good ones, for a foreign player to be sent packing.

Given the fact that NPB teams have become exceptionally good at picking out the most promising foreign players available (usually what we call 4-A players: guys who hit like major leaguers in AAA but have become too old to contend for major league starting jobs), but that even among these players only about half succeed quickly, long and consistently enough to stick around more than a year or two in NPB, its something of a shock how quickly NPB teams give up on foreign players with a proven track record.  This is so much the case that I’m always shocked on those rare occasions when a foreign hitter sticks around as long as three NPB seasons if he’s never had a single season OPS higher than about .815.

In fact, some of the best available foreign players are probably never considered by NPB teams, since their value is in their gloves rather than their bats.  In NPB, all the glove-tree guys are Japanese.

The best Gaijin hitter in NPB history has to be Tuffy Rhodes.  While he wasn’t a .300 hitter, his power and his ability to draw walks account for his exceptional RBI and Runs Scored totals, aside from the fact that he was once tied for the single season NPB home run record with the legendary Sadaharu Oh, before Wladimir Balentien was finally allowed to be the first foreign player to beat Oh’s record.

Foreign hitters who should eventually join Wally Yonamine in the NPB Hall of Fame are Rhodes, Alex Ramirez and Leron Lee.  Whether they will is another matter.  Apparently it takes a longer period of retirement before former players become eligible, and NPB’s Hall of Fame seems relatively more exclusive than MLB’s Hall of Fame, at least in terms of players.  The NPB Hall is particularly heavily stacked with non-players — for example, Lefty O’Doul is in Japan’s Hall of Fame for his goodwill tours to Japan in the 1930’s which increased the game’s popularity there, even though he isn’t in the MLB Hall of Fame despite an accomplished lifetime in the U.S. professional game.

The 2021 KBO Regular Season That Was

The two big pieces of news from the 2021 KBO regular season were that former Seattle Mariner and SoftBank Hawk Ariel Miranda set the single-season record with 225 Ks (in 173.2 IP) and Choi Jeung became the second KBO player to hit 400 HRs.

I still suspect Choi got cheated out of his chance at playing in MLB, but he now has a reasonable shot at the all-time KBO HR record which would make him a legend in South Korea. Lee Seung-Yuop is the current all-time leader at 467, plus another 159 in NPB. Choi is going into his age 35 season, but at age 34 he blasted 35 taters, his .972 OPS was second best in the Circuit, and he has three years left of his precedent-setting six-year guarantee with the now SSG Landers, so he and the team are committed to breaking the record.

Kang Baek-Ho‘s .971 OPS was KBO third best, and he’s going into his fifth-full KBO season at age 22 in ’22. He looks like a future MLBer if he stays healthy.

CF Lee Jung-hoo‘s .960 OPS was KBO fourth best, and he’ll be entering his age 23 season in ’22 with five full KBO seasons under his belt, so he is a real MLB prospect too.

My admittedly cursory revue of the final pitching stats indicated there are no South Korean pitching prospects of particular note at this moment and that Miranda might be the best bet to return to MLB if an MLB team is willing to guarantee at least $1.5 million with a shot at fifth starter for his tremendous 2021 performance – Miranda went 14-5 with a league-leading 2.33 ERA, aside from the Ks records.

The KBO’s 2021 starting pitching stats were dominated by foreigners, none of whom based on age and performance is as good a bet as Miranda for 2022 MLB purposes.

Slugging It Out in South Korea: The Best Foreign Hitters in KBO History, 2021-2022

This is the post-2021 regular season update of a post I originally published back in 2015.  South Korea’s KBO only began allowing foreign players in 1998, and it’s is a young league, starting play only in 1982.  This means the records for foreign players are very much in play almost every season.

Initially, KBO teams brought in mostly hitters; and the foreigners, at least at first, hit a lot of home runs.  As the league improved, KBO teams began to realize after about 2005 that foreign pitchers were worth more to them than the hitters — so much so that by 2012 and 2013, there were no foreign hitters in the league at all.

KBO teams expanded the roster space for foreigners from two to three beginning with the 2014 season, as the league was undergoing expansion, with the requirement that one of the three foreigners be a position player/hitter. Foreign hitters have been back in the league the last seven seasons and initially took advantage of what was until the 2019 season an extreme hitters’ league. However, relatively few have lasted long enough in the KBO to challenge the foreign player records set before 2010.

Batting Average  (2,000 at-bats)

1.     Jay Davis      .313

2.     Tyrone Woods   .294

3.     Tilson Brito    .292

Mel Rojas, Jr. .321 (in 1,971 at-bats)

Cliff Brumbaugh .299 (in 1,971 at-bats)

Mel Rojas, Jr. had a KBO career batting average of .321 in 1,971 at-bats through the end of the 2020 season. He had a tremendous 2020 season (.347/.417/.680 slash line), after which he signed a two-year deal to play with the Hanshin Tigers of Japan’s NPB. The first year with Hanshin was dreadful (.217/.282/.381 in 60 games). I expect Rojas to hit better in 2022, but there is still a good chance he’ll return to the KBO in 2023. Brumbaugh turned a big year in the KBO in 2004 into two seasons in NPB, but was back in the KBO in 2007.

Hits

1.      Jay Davis   979

2.     Tilson Brito  683

3.     Tyrone Woods  655

4. Mel Rojas, Jr. 633

5. Jamie Romak 610

Jay Davis had far and away the best career of any foreign hitter in the KBO, with Tyrone Woods as the only other player in the conversation.  Davis, Woods and Brito are the only three foreign players to reach 2,000 career KBO at-bats so far.

The problem is that very few foreigners have had long careers in the KBO.  Until the last ten years, when increased revenues made bigger salaries possible, the foreigners who played in KBO were clearly a cut below the foreign players who signed with Japanese NPB teams.  They tended not to maintain their initial KBO performance levels for long — three full seasons was and still is a long KBO career for a foreigner — or they moved on to greener NPB pastures or back to MLB.

Home Runs

1.     Tyrone Woods   174

2.     Jay Davis           167

3.     Jamie Romak     155

4. Mel Rojas, Jr. 132

5.     Eric Thames      124

6.     Cliff Brumbaugh  116

7.     Tilson Brito         112

8.     Karim Garcia      103

9.     Felix Jose            95

In the early days (late 1990’s and early 2000’s), KBO teams paid foreigners to hit home runs.  The most prolific was Tyrone Woods, who blasted 174 dingers over five KBO seaons and then moved on to the NPB, where he blasted 240 HRs in six seasons.  Woods never played even one game in the major leagues, and there are some reasons to believe that PEDs may have had something to do with his tremendous Asian performance, at least by the time he reached NPB.

Eric Thames was the best of the hitters to join the KBO since the foreign player roster expansion in 2014 (at least until Mel Rojas), and he was the caliber of player who would have signed with an NPB team during the earlier era when KBO teams were signing foreign sluggers.  As I predicted in October 2016, Thames did return to MLB (I actually predicted he’d sign with either an MLB or NPB team that off-season — the Yomiuri Giants signed Thames for 2021, but he got hurt and barely played at all in Japan), and his contract was a steal for the Milwaukee Brewers.

Cliff Brumbaugh played briefly for the Rangers and Rockies in 2001 before starting a successful seven year career in South Korea and Japan.  You probably remember Karim Garcia and Felix Jose, who both had significant major leagues careers, and you may even remember Tilson Brito, who played in 92 MLB games in 1996-1997 for the Blue Jays and the A’s.

Jamie Romak has probably played his final season in the KBO. He is now 36, slashed .225/.340/.425 in 2021 and missed the last two weeks of the regular season with an injury, and his $900K-to-$1.15M salary is at the high end in the 2021 salary-retrenching KBO.

Runs Scored

1.     Jay Davis    538

2.     Tyrone Woods   412

RBIs

1.     Jay Davis   591

2.     Tyrone Woods   510

3T. Mel Rojas, Jr. 409

3T. Jamie Romak 409

As you can see from the above numbers, the KBO records for foreign hitters are ready to be broken in all categories, because so relatively little has been accomplished by foreign hitters to date.  It’s mainly a matter of whether any of the post-2014 crop of foreign hitters can hang around long enough to add their names to my lists as the seasons pass.

The KBO imposed a $1M salary cap on new foreign players (or foreign players moving to a new team) a couple of years ago. This will impact the quality of the foreign players KBO teams can sign and makes it easier for better paying NPB to filch the best foreign hitters like Rojas and Jerry Sands.

A Name to Remember

Roque Salinas batted .400 in the Mexican League this summer. Sure, he only played in 45 games and accumulated only 109 plate appearances, he’s got no power (four doubles and two HRs) and doesn’t walk much (two this year), but .400 is .400, and HE’S ONLY 18 YEARS OLD.

The age is a big, big deal for a player playing in a league as good as the Mexican summer league. It’s about a AA league (it used to be classified as AAA, but mainly as a courtesy, based on a close working relationship with MLB), and an 18 year old who can hit in a AA league is a prospect, even if it’s a small sample size.

He’s a corner outfielder listed at 5’7″ and 176, which isn’t so small if you remember that Joe Morgan was about the same size in his prime. He’s 1-for-7 in two Mexican Winter League games so far, but it says something that a player with so little experience gets to play in the smaller winter league, which is a better league by virtue of its smaller size (10 winter teams compared to 18 summer teams) drawing from the same general talent pool.

Mark my words, an MLB or NPB team will buy his contract this off-season. 18 year olds who hit .400 in pro ball anywhere are worth taking a flyer on.

Best Player You’ve Never Heard Of, Vol. 7

Robert Suarez is the closer for the Hanshin Tigers in Japan’s NPB. His 36 saves leads the Central League by eight and NPB by two with fewer than 20 regular season games to play. He is a foreign player in Japan who never played in the MLB system.

Robert is the younger brother of Albert Suarez, who I remember when the reached the San Francisco Giants five years back. He’s also in NPB, working as a starter for the Yakult Swallows., Albert signed out of Venezuela at age 16 or 17, but his brother did not. Instead, the story, as I understand it, is that Robert was pitching semi-pro ball in Venezuela at age 22 when a Venezuelan player playing in Mexico saw him pitch back home and thought to himself that Robert had the arm if he could improve his mechanics. The countryman brought Robert back with him to Mexico, and Robert trained for a year until his Mexican League debut in 2015 at age 24, and It went well. Out of the bullpen, he posted a 1.71 ERA in 43 appearances with an exceptional pitching line.

The NPB big-money SoftBank Hawks took notice, and signed Robert up before the ink had dried on the 2015 season. His 2016 rookie year was a good one, but he promptly hurt his arm and missed the 2017 season. It took him two full seasons to work his way back, and at the end of 2019, the Hawks apparently gave up on him. The Hanshin Tigers stepped in, and the rest is history, so far.

In the short 2020 season, Suarez posted a 2.24 ERA and saved 25 games. This season, his ERA is 1.38 through 53 appearances so far. And he leads NPB in saves, as mentioned above.

Robert Suarez is 30 this season, so I kind of think he’d be a fool to leave NPB. He can earn about $5.5 million a year there, and it sure looks like he’s mastered that major league.

New Salary Structure in Japan’s NPB

Until this off-season, there was an unwritten rule in Japan’s NPB that no player could earn more than 650 million yen ($6.2M, but varies with exchange rate) per season. When the Yomiuri Giants made their last best offer to keep their superstar Hideki “Godzilla” Matsui before the 2003 season, they offered him a reported 10-year $61M contract, which was probably 650 million yen per season, times ten. That offer blew out of the water the unwritten four year free agent deal maximum, although no NPB player has gotten more than a four-year guarantee since then.

And no player had received more than 650M yen for a season. Both Tomoyuki Sugano and Masahiro Tanaka have completely blown through the 650M yen barrier this off-season.

Long-time Yomiuri Giants ace Sugano has been reported in the American press to have received a four-year $40M offer to stay in Tokyo. Two things to remember are that in Japan players and teams do no report actual contract amounts — all contracts are based on leaks and rumors, although I tend to think that relatively accurate information tends to get out in a capitalist society with a free press; and also, the figures published in the U.S. about Asian major league salaries pretty much always include incentive money.

Reports from Japan indicate that Sugano is guaranteed 800M yen ($7.7 million) per season. If he can also earn roughly 250M yen ($2.4M) in annual performance incentives, that’s roughly $10M per season. My guestimate is that an 800M yen guarantee with 250M yen in incentives per annum is roughly the contract Sugano received. Yomiuri can afford it, and they shelled out because they knew Sugano was serious about testing his skills in MLB.

Jim Allen says that Masahiro Tanaka is reportedly getting a two-year deal at 900M yen per season ($8.6M). He points out that the numbers aren’t verifiable. However, it is hard to imagine that Tanaka could not have beat by a lot a two-year $17.2M guarantee staying in the U.S. even with all the MLB belt-tightening that has been going on.

My guess is that Tanaka is really getting a two-year 1.8 billion yen guarantee without incentives. The Rakuten Golden Eagles are not one of NPB’s rich three teams (they are in the larger middle class), but they could well be willing to take the risk that Tanaka would mean enough to the box office and play-off hopes that he is worth the kind of guarantee it would take to sign him.

It’s worth noting here that endorsement money is better for baseball players in Japan than it is in the U.S. Tanaka is leaving contract money on the table by returning to Japan, but he’ll more than make up for it by returning to NPB while still in his prime.

Sugano and Tanaka are exceptionally great pitchers and of exceptional value to their teams. But once the salary scale is moved up this significantly, there will be pitchers and position players who follow. For example, if Kodai Senga stays healthy, the wealthy SoftBank Hawks will have no option but to match the contract the Giants gave Sugano if they want to have any chance of keeping him when he finally becomes a true free agent. Otherwise, it is off to MLB for Senga.

After Senga, NPB won’t stop producing world-class baseball talent. There may be only as many 800M+ yen contracts going forward in NPB as there were 600M+yen contracts the previous 25 years, but a new benchmark has definitely been set, and there’s no going back