I Think I'm Turning Japanese

On Tuesday, the Chicago Cubs did what has become the adopting of Third World children of the baseball world, and signed Japanese baseball superstar Kosuke Fukudome to a four year, $48 million contract. (I'm not really sure how you pronounce that last name correctly, but I'm pretty sure it's not "Fuck-you-dome," as everyone at work calls him.) The Cubs become one of the latest in a list of teams that think that bringing talent from Japan could net them The Next Sadaharu Oh.

While we're on the subject of The Big Oh, I think people may be misled as to his great accomplishment, which was hitting 868 home runs, 100 more than than Bonds has hit in the same number of years. Back in the days when Oh played, the ballparks in Japan were about the size of Little League fields, with the foul poles in the 290 foot range, and 390 feet out to center. In a field that size, Hank Aaron would have hit 1000 home runs...a year. Nowadays, they play in regular-sized fields, and no one's been able to get even halfway to that record. Plus, I'm pretty sure baseball over there is quite similar to the video game RBI Baseball, where you're able to hit like 20 home runs in a game. And yet, teams think just because a guy is the best player in Japan that he's going to cross the ocean and be an immediate impact player on their team.

Here, let's play a little game: Name one player originally from Japan who is just as good here as he was there who is not named "Ichiro Suzuki."

Give up? Well, the answer's "no one," since no other Japanese players that have come over here have had their skills translate to American baseball. Not Hideki Matsui, who did more in fewer games in Japan than he's done with the Yankees. Not Daisuke Matsuzaka, who should be better than the second-best pitcher for a Red Sox team that paid $100 million to acquire him. Not Takashi Saito, who spent 13 years in Japan not being any good, only to come to America in the final years of his career. Not even Hideo Nomo, the guy who started this trend, who was just pretty average. (We got plenty of average, home-grown talent; no need to import it.) Just a lot of guys who were hot shit in Japan that aren't all that great over here.

The biggest problem with these guys is their limited upside. Since most of them have been playing in Japan for some time, by the time they get here, they're already in their 30s or fastly approaching it. They're in the primes of their careers right now, and it's only going backwards from here. (I suspect the days of players having a late-30s resurgence are over with. They'll just get old and retire from now on.) Ichiro is easily on pace to break Pete Rose's hit record; too bad he'll be as old as Rose (who played until he was 87) was when he does it, and that'd only be like 18 seasons!

Fukudome is already 31. Forty eight mil for a guy about to start the downslope of his career seems like a lot to me. It's one thing if you want to bring an old guy like Crash Davis up from the minors for the league minimum. It's quite another to import one who's never played in America before at $10 mil a year. (Dice-K, who's only 27, is a steal at $6 mil.)

But, what do I know? I don't run a baseball team. I think paying a $51 million tariff on a guy is a bad deal, but this is obviously something that time and life experience teaches you is "a good deal."

What's that? Theo Epstein's the same age as I am?!?

Hmmm. Maybe that was a pretty stupid deal after all.