Shunsuke Watanabe Scouting Report

According to recent media reports out of Japan, Shunsuke Watanabe of the Chiba Lotte Marines in the NPB will be headed to the United States to try to make it in the Majors. Watanabe is a 37 year old (turning 38 next August) right-handed pitcher listed at just 5-10 155, very small for a professional pitcher.

Watanabe is a strange candidate for the Majors because of his lack of any kind of recent success. He has had an ERA of over 4 in the NPB in 5 of the last 6 seasons, with 2011 being the exception, with a 3.68 ERA when league average ERA was just under 3. In 2013, he made a grand total of 6 appearances, all starts, in the Ichi-gun, striking out as many batters as he walked. Watanabe hasn't had a season of at least a 2 to 1 K/BB since 2008.

Furthermore, Watanabe is known for his Submarine delivery, something that rules him out as a starter in the Majors. Yet, that is what he has been his entire NPB career (240 of his 255 Ichi-Gun appearances have been as a starter, no relief appearances since 2010). So statistically, he isn't even very interesting , but as I mentioned the delivery, let's take more of a look of it below (you can see his delivery and the rest of the deliveries of the 2013 Chiba Lotte Marines here).

Here is a GIF of Watanabe's delivery from behind:

As you can see, it is a clear and classic submarine delivery. He really starts with a pause, coming down very slowly before coming forward very quickly. This is show even better from the side in this look:

  There is no real jerk or violent movement in his delivery, and his head seems to stay very straight. His leg movement provides a little more deception and a little less continuity, but his landing point seems to be very calm. Here is a look from the top/front

The glove hides slighty behind his leg as he prevents the hitter from seeing where his arm comes from. If you are a hitter, you really don't see the ball until he is about to release it, and he seems to get the arm out (perhaps what you might call "extension") further than you would expect.

While this pitching motion is rare, it isn't exactly unique, as there have been American pitchers with similar motions. Below, look for comparisons to the two right-handed pitchers with the lowest release points in the Pitch F/X era (per my leaderboards, which need to be updated).

In Chad Bradford, we see the same sort of pause, leg kick, and ability to hide the ball. At least in the look below, Watanabe might actually be a tad lower when he releases the ball. Watanabe might have a little bit better landing point as well.

Brad Ziegler releases the ball higher, and has a lot more jerking motion in his delivery, with a much higher leg kick and while the actual landing point seems fine, he has a lot of momentum throwing him forward. Bradford is a closer comparison.

Of course, this doesn't include stuff, and pitch selection. Watanabe does not throw hard, even compared to other submarine pitchers, averaging less than 75 MPH on his fastball and sinker since 2010, and under 74 MPH in 2012.

Watanabe's most used pitch is the sinker, like most sidearmers or submarine pitchers.

This is a pitch that can break back armside and get low in the zone, getting him the grounders that most submarine/sidearm pitchers covet

He will throw what looks like a 4-seam fastball at times, usually more straight and higher in the zone

The velocity makes the term "fastball" lose all meaning, but he has to change the eye level of hitters at least occasionally.

The curve is where Watanabe gets really slow, but also a little tricky, as it can be hard to differentiate when it is a curve and when it is a slider. We are talking about pitches getting down below 60 MPH now

This slider is a little easier to pick out thanks to its horizontal movement, really fading away from the hitter. The break is so slow, that it is hard to see the pitch itself actually fooling a hitter, though perhaps it works with his deception, as hitters don't pick up the ball as early as they normally do, and the ball breaks away by the time they do.

For Watanabe, the main question when it comes to whether or not he can pitch in the Majors is: Can the method of slow, slow, and slower work in the Majors, even in a heavily specialized and platooned role?  We''ve seen one Japanese Sidearm/Submarine pitcher have success in the Majors (against right-handers that is) and dominate AAA in Yoshinori Tateyama. However, Tateyama throws quite a bit harder, and wasn't valued highly by the Texas Rangers after coming over, spending a lot of time in AAA before he was let go. Despite dominating AAA, the Yankees never decided to bring him up. We've seen guys like Pat Neshek and Cody Eppley bounce around, not really valued highly by most teams, even with the good numbers against righties and good AAA numbers. So it is really hard to see Watanabe get any kind of guaranteed deal at the Major League level. Most likely, I think he is a guy that is brought to spring training on a minor league deal, so a team can get a look at how his stuff plays against MLB hitters, and most likely stashed in AAA where he will have to prove himself until there is an opening in the bullpen. When given the chance, it is impossible for me to say whether or not he will actually have MLB success, because we just don't have a lot of comparable data to go on for guys that throw this slow. 

Is the Radar Gun in Japan "Cold"?

In my article on Masahiro Tanaka, I speculated that Tanaka could see an average fastball velocity increase in the Majors because of some slow pitches that were tagged as fastballs by Yahoo!. The point was that the MLBAM tags seem to be superior to Yahoo! tags, so the fastball wouldn't actually be better, it would just look harder thanks to better labels, even if it is a slight increase. However, I have had a couple of readers on Twitter argue that pitchers who go from the NPB to the Majors have an increase in fastballs for whatever reason, unrelated to Yahoo's taggings. With Patrick Newman getting his NPB pitch data back online, this is something we can test. The data starts in 2009 and (currently) ends at 2012, so I looked through the player index, and looked for pitchers that pitched in the Majors as well as the NPB. I then removed every player that didn't play in the Majors and the NPB in consecutive years, because if there is a gap in years, then of course there will be drastic velocity changes. I only inputted the fastball velocities of the consecutive years. To use Yu Darvish as an example, I used just his 2011 NPB fastball velocity and just his 2012 MLB fastball velocity (there were a few pitchers that pitched in the MLB, then Japan, then the MLB again. For those pitchers, I used the first year of the second stint of the MLB as the velocity, along with the last year of the NPB stint). For the MLB velocity, I just used FanGraphs' Pitch F/X section for ease. I got 44 pitchers in my sample, not a large one, but one that should at least give us an idea of whether or not the hypothesis is correct.

The pitchers' average fastball velocity in the NPB was 89.04 MPH, while their average velocity was 91.22 MPH in the Majors, a gigantic 2.18 MPH difference. Of course, it isn't that easy. Many times, pitchers that were used as fringe relievers in the MLB were/are signed to NPB teams to be used as starters. If a pitcher pitches in relief in the Majors, and then as a starter in the NPB, then their average fastball velocity will be artificially down in Japan. For instance, in the Majors, the average velocity for starters is 91.4 MPH in 2013, and 92.9 MPH for relievers. This doesn't make up the whole difference, but it does possibly explain at least some of this. So I looked at the 44 pitchers again, and noted whether or not they changed from a starter to reliever or vise versa (if the majority of their outings were as a starter, I considered them a starter, etc.). Only 19 of them actually had role changes, with the other 25 staying the same.

Out of the 25 that stayed in the same role, their average NPB velocity was 90.02, while their average MLB velocity was 91.66 MPH. So there still seems to be a difference of about 1.5 MPH in velocity between the NPB and the Majors. The actual reason for this is unclear, and any theories put forth by me would all be speculation. Also, I should note that I didn't look at 2013 data, so there is always the chance that this has changed in someway, but for now, it appears that Yahoo's radar gun readings for the NPB are about 1.5 MPH slow compared to those of MLBAM's 50 foot release point designation.

There should be some caution exercised however, with a sample size this small, because there could be other factors driving the velocity changes. For example, two of the biggest velocity climbers from the NPB to the Majors were Hisashi Iwakuma and Chang-yong Lim, whose velocity increases could be explained, at least partially, from better health in the Majors (Iwakuma has batted shoulder problems in his career and was scarcely used in the first half of the season with Seattle, only to emerge in the rotation in the second half, Lim had Tommy John surgery in 2012, and his 2013 season is him coming off that. These injuries could have slowed down their fastballs in their last year of the NPB, while the MLB version of the pitcher is the healthy version). Pitchers like Yoshinori Tateyama, Colby Lewis and Yu Darvish actually saw a small decrease in velocity from the NPB to the Majors (all of them going to Texas), and Kam Mickolio has actually gained about a MPH in Japan after leaving the Majors.

Sortable Reliever Release Points

In a previous post, I collected the release point averages for every starter in the Pitch F/X era and created a chart. In this post, I will look at the relievers of the Pitch F/X era in the same way. I used the same methodology I did with the starters.

The best view of the chart is actually by following the link and seeing it full screen (and you should be able to download it). However,this isn't very convenient, so here is the chart and the spreadsheet below:


If you just want to see or save the picture:

Yoshi: What Happened?

Today against the Athletics, Rangers reliever Yoshinori Tateyama came in with the bases loaded and promptly gave up a grand slam. His last two outings have been really bad: 1 out, 5 hits, 2 homers allowed, 6 ER. It hasn't been all bad though, in fact, Yoshi has been quite good. Even after recent struggles his ERA is 4.29 (with a 2-0 record), 40 strikeouts (with just 10 walks), and a WHIP of 1.024. His WAR is still .2, and with a salary of $800,000, his WASP (War and Salary Per) is 4,000 (which isn't all that great, but by no means horrible). The side armer has clearly been struggling with command as of late (something that was pinpoint when he first came up), and I think this is a much bigger issue than "the league figuring him out" (as one member of Twitter suggested).