Blink and You’ve Missed Them

I got real enjoyment following Jared Koenig‘s recent major league shot with the Oakland A’s. I had noticed Koenig back in 2018 when he had a big season in the fly-by-night Independent-A Pacific Association, truly the bottom of the professional baseball barrel. The start of the Covid pandemic in the early Spring of 2020 killed off the Pacific Association after six seasons of play, apparently for good.

Koenig struck out 140 batters in 96.2 IP for the 2018 San Rafael Pacifics, which earned him a promotion to the Frontier League in 2019, where he struck out 133 batters in 104.1 IP and posted an excellent 2.24 ERA. He continued his terrific 2019 campaign with six well-pitched starts in the winter Australian League.

The Frontier League and the Australian League are still a long, long way from the Majors, but they are at least leagues where someone might take notice if you play as well as Koenig had. The Oakland A’s clearly took notice because they signed him in December 2019 and brought him back in 2021 after the Covid pandemic prevented Koenig from playing in 2020. It certainly did not hurt that Koenig had once been a 35th round draft pick by the Chicago White Sox out of an Arizona JC in 2014, even if he hadn’t pitched well enough subsequently at four-year schools to get drafted again.

Koenig had a strong season at AA Midland in 2021, and started the 2022 season at AAA Las Vegas, a tough place to pitch. In eight starts and nine appearances, Koenig posted a 2.21 ERA and a pitching line of 53 IP, 39 hits, 4 HR and 15 BB allowed and 61 K, earning a shot in the worst-in-the-AL A’s’ starting rotation.

Koenig was not surprisingly overmatched in his first taste of MLB action at age 28. Although the A’s won two of his four starts, Koenig had only one effective start and 6.38 ERA. He did earn a major league victory, which I am certain made all the toil for peanuts Koenig went through to earn that moment worth it in his own mind. His peripheral numbers suggested he needs more time working on his pitching at AAA, and the A’s sent him down on June 26th.

2022 has been a great year for the Pecos League’s business model. The Pecos League is a pay-to-play league where players have to pay to submit an application and then get paid a stipend of $550 for a compressed 11-week season. That’s $50 a week, and not enough to feed a hungry young athlete.

The Pecos League is for undrafted college players not impressive enough to sign contracts with the better and more established Indy-Leagues (the Atlantic League, the American Association and the Frontier). The business models of the best Indy-A leagues still requires each team to fill at least a third (usually more) of their rosters with players with no or only one season of prior professional baseball experience in order to stay below each team’s salary cap amount. Thus, the players in the Pecos League are all guys who just want to give professional baseball a try even if they have to pay to do it.

By my count, at least five players who played in the Pecos League’s first ten seasons from 2011 to 2020 have subsequently made the majors. Jon Edwards (2011) has probably had the most successful pro career of anyone starting his career in the Pecos League. He pitched 49 games in parts of four major league seasons, enough to earn his MLB pension, and then pitched two years in Japan for NPB’s Hanshin Tigers, where my sources say he earned a total of 160,000,000 yen, which amounted to almost $1.5M when Edwards earned it in 2020-2021.

Chris Smith, who pitched all of four games for the Blue Jays in 2017, also pitched in the Pecos League in 2011, after one unsuccessful relief appearance in the Frontier League in 2010.

April 2021 White Sox phenom Yermin Mercedes played in the Pecos League in 2014. Mercedes had played three years in the Dominican Summer League as a Washington Nationals prospect, but failed to stick and used the Pecos League for his age 21 season as a way to get more professional experience and keep himself in the eyes of MLB scouts. It worked, as the Baltimore Orioles signed him to a contract in 2015.

Jared Koenig pitched in the Pecos League in 2017, pitching well enough to earn a five-start look from the American Association’s Salina Stockade later in the summer 2017 season. The best performers in the Pecos League typically get shots from American Association teams as soon the 11-week Pecos League season ends. Most do not stick in the American Association on their first attempts, as the jump in competition is steep, probably the equivalent of jumping from the Dominican Summer League directly to a full-season MLB-system A league. That’s how Koenig ended up pitching in the Pacific Association.

However, Koenig is not the only 2017 Pecos League/Pacific Association pitcher to pitch in the major leagues this year. Logan Gillaspie pitched 10.1 innings in 11 relief appearances for the Orioles this season in May and June before the O’s sent him down to AAA Norfolk on June 18th.

Gillaspie’s 4.35 ERA for the Orioles wasn’t bad, but his peripheral numbers were much less impressive. However, Gillaspie has pitched well in 19.1 AA and AAA innings this year, and, like Koenig, could return to the Show later this year if he can continue to pitch effectively at the AAA level.

Gillaspie was only 20 when he played in the Pecos League, apparently coming out of a JC in Oxnard. Although he also failed to stick in a brief opportunity with the Salina Stockade and finished the season in the Pacific Association, he had the advantage of being younger than most of the players coming out of four-year schools in the Pecos League and received a contract with the Milwaukee Brewers’ organization before the 2018 season began. There is no substitute for tender age when it comes to getting a minor league contract from an MLB organization.

For a league like the Pecos League, having two veterans reach the major leagues in the same season is pure public relations gold. The league can continue to pay its players peanuts for years to come on the proven-not-impossible (but still extremely unlikely) dream that playing in the Pecos could be a stepping stone to the majors.

Other than Koenig and Gillaspie, the only other Pacific Association veteran to reach the majors that I could find is now-former Tampa Bay Ray Chris Mazza. After being released by the Marlins’ organization, Mazza, a Diablo Valley product, was able to turn effective pitching for the San Rafael Pacifics in 2018 into a contract with the Mets’ organization and reached the majors only a year later.

Mazza pitched briefly for the Mets, Red Sox and Rays over the last four major league seasons, but the Rays released him on June 22nd. At age 32, Mazza may have to return to the Indy-A leagues if he wants to keep his professional career going. At least, he has earned his MLB pension with more than a year of credited major league service.

The Pacific Association was only able to attract about half a dozen former major league players in its six years of operation, perhaps most famously Jose Canseco when he was in his early 50’s.

As a final note, the San Rafael Pacifics joined the Pecos League as a franchise for the 2021 season, and the Pecos league also has a franchise in Martinez, California, where I saw my one and only Pacific League game in 2018.

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.

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.

The Classic Baseball Injury

I just read that Milwaukee Brewers’ pitcher Devin Williams will likely miss the post-season after breaking his pitching hand punching a wall. That is the classic ballplayer’s injury if ever there was one.

Some teams try to teach their young pitchers to punch things with their non-pitching hand if they need to blow off steam, but it is against human nature not to punch with your dominant hand when you lash out in frustration or anger.

I’m over 50 now and have been following major league baseball closely since 1978. One thing I’ve noticed is that I may get older but the major league players remain young men who never stop making the same mistakes as each new generation succeeds the last one. Young, cock-strong pitchers will always break their hands against walls, at least once in a while. Some young players will always make mistakes that major leaguers really shouldn’t make, even when they are under 25. Others will make really bad life-style choices and will piss away their talents and their opportunities for wealth, fame and glory.

That new generations will make the same old mistakes is one of the few things you can rely on in an ever changing world.

Minor League Strikeout Kings

I recently saw a couple of twitter posts claiming that Nelson Figueroa is the “All-Time” Minor League Strikeout King with 1,505 minor league strikeouts. Figueroa was a fine Minor League star of the modern era, but he isn’t even in the top ten all-time in terms of Minor League strikeouts.

The misconception that Figueroa is the minor league strikeout GOAT is mainly due to the fact that Baseball Reference’s minor league stats prior to 1946 are woefully inadequate. The actual all-time Minor League Strikeout King is either Oyster Joe Martina or George Brunet, depending on whether you consider the summer Mexican League a “minor league.”

According to my mid-1980’s copies of Minor League Stars Volumes I and II published by SABR, Oyster Joe struck out 2,770 minor leaguers in a pro career that ran from 1910 to 1931, mostly for the Beaumont Oilers in the Texas League and the New Orleans Pelicans in the Southern Association. By today’s standards, both leagues would probably classify as AA with the Southern Association being the better circuit during the years Martina played in them.

Oyster Joe spent only one season in the major leagues, as a 34 year old rookie for the 1924 World Champion Washington Senators. He went 6-8 with a 4.67 ERA. His main utility was eating up 125.1 IP, fifth best on the team, and he pitched one shutout inning in the World Series against the New York Giants.

George Brunet went 69-93 across parts of 15 major league seasons, most notably for the California Angels in the late 1960’s. When his major league career ended at age 36, he pitched in AAA until age 38 and then pitched in the Mexican League until age 49. He last pitched professionally in 1984.

Brunet struck out 3,175 minor league batters, well more than 1,000 of those in his last 11 or 12 seasons in Mexico.

Another minor leaguer worth mentioning here is Kewpie Dick Barrett (he was only 5’9 and 175 lbs and even then that was small for a right-hander). Barrett struck out 1,866 Pacific Coast League batters in the 1930’s and 1940’s, when the PCL was the best of the what we would now call the AAA leagues. Most of Barrett’s major league career took place between 1943 and 1945 between the ages of 36 and 38, when most of the best major league players were serving in the military.

Barrett’s 1,866 Ks in the PCL are the most by a pitcher in a single top minor league, what we would now call AA and AAA.

A Good Year for Marginal Major Leaguers

Just about the only group of MLB-system players who will benefit from the 2020 season are the marginal major leaguers.  Not just the 4-A players who elected to sign with Asian major league teams in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and will get paid for a full season of play, but also the 4-A types who elected to stay in the U.S. this season.

About 11 players are sitting out the 2020 season and 84 have tested positive for Covid-19 so far, opening up a lot of major league roster time for healthy marginal major leaguers to accumulate some service time toward future pension benefits and also maybe show MLB teams they deserve more time in the Show in 2021.  Other players who got hurt in the abbreviated Spring (Summer) Training won’t get to play at all in 2020, which should give the marginal players who do a leg up in 2021.

In fact, the Opening Day line-up for the San Francisco Giants looked to be almost entirely 4-A players, but that may have more to do with the Gints just not being very good this year.

Also, with teams limited to 60 players per organization and just about every team carrying about 8 to 12 top prospects who aren’t yet major league ready but need to get the reps to develop, the 4-A guys are going to get the call when somebody on the major league roster gets hurt.  The groups that really got killed this season are the AAA and AA players good enough to be roster fillers and Class A players not seen as top prospects.  A few of the AAA roster fillers got jobs this year in Taiwan’s CPBL, but with no baseball in Mexico and only very limited play in the Indy-A’s, these guys are SOL.  I’ll be amazed if any Winter Ball is played anywhere this year, which is how a lot of players make enough money to keep playing the next summer.

A full season of no play is just a killer for any player over the age of 27.  Pitchers can come back from Tommy John surgery, but position players, even major league stars, don’t lose a full season and come back the same.

One thing is for sure — now more than ever getting off to hot start when the opportunity comes is everything.  A marginal player who gets hot for 40 games this season is going to look pretty good when the executives are sitting around this winter charting out their teams’ futures.

We’ve all seen players who look great for 40 games in April and May and then the league catches up with them and proves why they haven’t gotten a major league shot before.  Brian LaHair of the 2012 Cubbies springs to mind.  On May 22nd after 40 games he was batting .313 with a 1.028 OPS.  He finished the season at .259 and .784, because the NL figured out he couldn’t hit lefties.  He had to go play in Japan in 2013 and had exactly the same kind of season once NPB teams had figured out he couldn’t hit their lefties either.  This year the league won’t get the same chance to catch up or figure the hot-streaker out.

Covid-19 Will Finish a Lot of Baseball Careers Too

This is a baseball blog, so I’m going to ignore the 130,000+ Americans to date who’ve died of the disease and talk about the impact of the pandemic on the professional lives of professional baseball players.

MLB teams will not only be playing a highly abbreviated 60 game season (pending a negotiated 64 or 66 game season with expanded play-offs, which the owners very much want), but franchise rosters will apparently be limited to 60 players for 2020.  Major league roster limits will be 30-26 during the shortened season, plus a 3-player “taxi squad” in case someone on the major league roster gets hurt or tests positive.

That means only 30 players on the minor league squad.  That isn’t enough to play more than 3-inning practice games.  I haven’t heard whether the minor league squads will be playing against each other.  However, I don’t see how the minor league guys can be ready step into the majors if they aren’t playing games against each other.

The 60-man franchise limit means a lot of minor leaguers won’t be playing baseball in 2020.  Solid, roster-filler AAA players over age 28 will not be included as teams put together their 60-man, as teams will want more promising younger AA players instead, along with all the organization’s top prospects, to whom teams will want to give playing team even if they are initially in over their heads.

I imagine that every single player Class A+ and below who isn’t seen as a top prospect by his team will not being playing any baseball this summer.

For minor league players over the age of 28, a full year off is going to be nearly impossible to come back from, at least for position players.  A full year off at this age is not good for the batting eye or foot speed.

Players in the lower minors under the age of 25 can possibly come back from a full year off, but it’s going to stunt a lot of careers for players who might have been better than their draft pedigree.  And that’s even to say that MLB plays half-way-full minor league seasons in 2021.

The Owners have been fighting to reduce the size of the minor leagues dramatically, and the Coronavirus may mean significant reduction in leagues and levels when things get back to normal compared to immediately before the pandemic struck.

However, it’s been a good year for players from the Americas in Asia in 2020.  KBO and CPBL teams are well into their seasons, and NPB is now almost 14 games in, which probably means that every foreign player in these leagues has received a paycheck, which is more than a lot of pro ball players in the States can say.

And better foreign players are available to Asian teams because the American options have narrowed considerably.  I don’t think there is any way the Kiwoom Heroes sign Addison Russell for $530,000 for the rest of the season in any kind of normal year.

The CPBL should be able to find better foreign pitchers for their money.  Their bread and butter is the kind of 28+ AAA pitcher who isn’t likely to make any team’s 60-man franchise roster.