(Image of Petagine taken from BaseballGuru.com)
There’s been a lot of Sox dealings with the Japanese leagues this offseason: signing Denney Tomori, selling Jamie Brown’s contract to the Hanshin Tigers, and now signing Roberto Petagine from the Yakult Swallows. (Gabe Kapler going to the Yomiuri Giants technically was an FA deal, not a Sox deal.) The Japan Times now reports on the formalisation of those ties, with the Sox agreeing to send two coaches (Far East area scout Jon Deeble and Double-A manager Todd Clauss) and two minor-leagures (and minor leaguers Justin Sherrod and David Murphy) to join the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks spring training camp next week. I’m hoping this all works out better than the Korean experiment…
Looking from the other side, I’ve recently been thinking that a team could really succeed in Japanese baseball by adopting an OBP-centric approach (the so-called “Moneyball” style). Seems like Japanese baseball often favours an approach that rewards great amounts of effort and intensity, regardless of whether that effort is productive - or at least that’s my impression from Robert Whiting’s You Gotta Have Wa. I’m guessing this means “hustling” and “scrappy” types of players might be overvalued in the Japanese leagues. So I’ll also be interested in seeing what the Hawks learn from the Sox.
Fukuoka’s a lovely city, incidentally - was there on an exchange programme once. More rural, not quite the craziness of Tokyo. And I got a kick out of having luggage tags that read FUK-SIN.