Japanese right-hander Shohei Otani has announced that he will stay in Japan and sign with the Nippon Ham Fighters, the team that drafted him the first-round of the 2012 NPB Draft. The announcement was expected for a few days now, according to the Japanese media, but this made it official. According to both the Japanese media and the Dodgers media, ... Read More »
Shohei Otani has announced today that he will hold a press conference on Sunday, and, according to Sanspo, the expectation is that he will say he has chosen to stay in Japan with the Nippon Ham Fighters. —– On Dec. 7, Nippon Ham announced that Shohei Otani will hold a news conference on Dec. 9 in the Iwate Prefecture. It’s ... Read More »
Shohei Otani, who once declared definitively that he was headed to America, is having second thoughts about that decision after meeting with the Nippon Ham Fighters, which was the thing I feared the most at the time of the announcement. Shohei Otani, 18, who had vowed to sign in MLB, might now lean to staying in Japan, per Japanese media. ... Read More »
Grantland: Part 1 of Jonah Keri ranking the 50 best players in terms of trade value. No Dodgers here yet, but Carlos Santana finds a spot at #43. The other two catcher rankings are the ones likely to elicit the most hate mail. In the first draft of this list, I had Santana considerably higher. Twenty-six-year-old switch-hitting catcher, career .806 ... Read More »
Didn’t realize it until I was done typing it up, but this is an exclusively Japanese player rumor update. Anyway, Kyuji Fujikawa is reportedly down to five teams, with one of them being the Dodgers. Fujikawa has reportedly met with the Dodgers, Angels, Orioles, Cubs and Diamondbacks. The Rangers are also said to have interest in the 32-year-old, who has ... Read More »
So a popular question lately has been: “What the hell happened to Shohei Otani?” In short? Nothing, because despite whatever speculation there had been about MLB teams technically having no need to respect NPB exclusivity rights, like I said in a previous post about the situation, I see no upside for an MLB team to just barge in and violate ... Read More »
Just a quick update here on the status of Shohei Otani, who I have been following because the Dodgers are one of the rumored teams in the lead for his services. As they promised, the Nippon Ham Fighters have taken him in the first round of today’s NPB Draft, which is risky to say the least. Has he changed his ... Read More »
The big news out of Japan today is that the Nippon Ham Fighters have decided to select Shohei Otani with their first-round pick in tomorrow’s NPB Draft, according to Sanspo. Ever since I tweeted out that information, I’ve been getting a bunch of questions, so I thought I should make a post dedicated to answering them as best I could. ... Read More »
Shohei Otani, the fire-balling high school Japanese pitching phenom, has opted for a career in the MLB, according to the Associated Press. Otani, a 6-foot-4 right-hander who has thrown a fastball between 99 and 100 mph, has been scouted by several major league teams including the Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox. The 18-year-old Otani said “I think I ... Read More »
The Dodgers are “front-runners” for the services of Japanese high school phenom Shohei Otani, according to the Japanese media. Meanwhile, stateside, Alex Speier of WEEI and Gerry Fraley of the Dallas Morning News both confirm the Dodgers interest in the 18-year-old, who stands 6’4″ at 190 pounds. —– Logan White and the Dodgers scouting department has been cultivating a relationship ... Read More »
Chad Moriyama Dodgers, Sabermetrics, Scouting