San Francisco Giants free-agent profile: Masataka Yoshida
The Giants should sign Aaron Judge to a stupid contract in exchange for temporary endorphins, an ephemeral bump in season-ticket sales, the fleeting goodwill of the fans and a whole mess of dingers. Almost all of you are in agreement on this, correct? All that’s left to do now is wait for a month or two and sift through 829 different articles and stray rumors.
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The Giants’ ability or inability to sign Judge won’t be the only storyline of the offseason. Goodness, no. They have so many positions to fill and such little time. The New York Post’s Jon Heyman is hearing that they’ll attempt to sign two outfielders, which makes sense. The only problem with this idea is that after Judge, there’s a huge drop to Brandon Nimmo, who is somewhere between “solid” and “superstar,” and most of the options after him are platoon-types like A.J. Pollock, Andrew Benintendi and Joc Pederson. This is the right offseason to stock up on All-Star shortstops, but it certainly isn’t the right offseason to build an outfield.
However, there is another option.
Jon Morosi is reporting that NPB superstar Masataka Yoshida is likely to be posted soon, and he’ll almost certainly interest the Giants. If you give him a chance, he’ll almost certainly interest you. Who is this new entrant in a thin class of free agent outfielders, and why should/shouldn’t the Giants want him?
Let’s explore the idea of Masataka Yoshida, a 29-year-old all-star from the Orix Buffaloes. He just might the best baseball player alive that I definitely didn’t just start researching furiously a couple days ago.
Why the Giants would want Masataka Yoshida
With the help of NPB Stats, let’s take a look at the highest walk-to-strikeout ratios for qualified hitters in NPB last season.
1. Masataka Yoshida — 1.95
2. Toshiro Miyazaki — 1.26
3. Munetaka Murakami — 0.92
4. Yoshihiro Maru — 0.91
5. Shogo Nakamura — 0.81
6. Hiroaki Shimauchi — 0.77
7. Go Matsumoto — 0.76
8. Keita Sano — 0.75
9. Daichi Suzuki — 0.73
10. Kento Itohara — 0.73
I don’t expect you to be impressed by the specific players that Yoshida is above, but look at the gap between him and the best bat-control artists in Japanese baseball. It’s not even close. For every Yoshida strikeout, he takes almost two walks. The only major leaguers to come close to this BB/K ratio in recent years are Joey Votto, Juan Soto, Victor Martinez and Alex Bregman.
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That’s impressive enough without context, but note that Yoshida is second among all qualified hitters in walk rate and also second in strikeout rate. He’s not Jeff McNeil, limiting strikeouts and walking an average amount. He’s not Aaron Judge, leading his league in walks while whiffing quite a bit. He’s the Wade Boggs or Tony Gwynn of the Pacific League.
Of course, if you expand that search of MLB BB/K heroes just a little more to include 2020 and some older seasons, you’ll get a whole host of Giants legends.
• Tommy La Stella, 2020 (2.25)
• Jeff Keppinger, 2010 (1.42)
• Norichika Aoki, 2013 (1.38)
• Marco Scutaro, 2013 (1.32)
Not all of them were able to hold those shiny ratios for much longer, and all of them had the same flaw: a lack of power. All the bat control and plate discipline in the world won’t help a major leaguer if pitchers aren’t scared to challenge them.
Good news, then. Yoshida has power. It’s not generational power like Munetaka Murakami, but he was fourth in the Pacific League with 23 homers, and his slugging percentage and isolated power were both third among all qualified hitters. It’s not like home run totals can be copied and pasted from NPB to MLB, but it gives you a sense of how much power he has relative to his peers. He has plenty, which bodes well for a player with historically outstanding swing-decision metrics.
Here he is hitting a walk-off homer just a couple weeks ago in the Japan Series, which the Buffaloes won in seven games:
読売にもこんな打者が…#吉田正尚
— 颯さん @ポランコ 11/23 ファン感！！ (@GOGOSou07) October 27, 2022
That, uh, wasn’t a cheapie.
Yoshida’s power might not translate to anything more than 15-20 homers in the majors, but he won’t be Ozzie Smith, either. He’d make McCovey Cove Dave happy a few times, for sure.
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But it begins and ends with his ability to work the count and hit strikes hard. That is the point of this silly sport, after all, and there’s evidence that Yoshida is better at it than almost any other professional hitter. I’m not a smart enough analyst to explain why Yoshi Tsutsugo’s power didn’t show up in the majors, but Hideki Matsui’s did. I don’t know how Shogo Akiyama can go from three 20+ homer seasons for Seibu to zero home runs in 364 MLB plate appearances. Evaluating players without major-league experience will always be one of the Millennium Prize Problems of baseball.
That might be true, but when you go through this list of players who made the jump from NPB to MLB, one of the only things we know for certain is that not one of the disappointments had a BB/K anywhere close to Yoshida’s. If he fails to hit at the major-league level, it will be a brand new data point, not a repeat of an older one. That kind of plate discipline, at one of the highest professional levels of the sport, is impossible to fake.
There was, however, an outfielder who came over to MLB and had a BB/K close to Yoshida’s, at least for a season. He was also a left-handed corner outfielder, and he also happened to play for an Orix team. In 1997, he walked 62 times, with just 36 strikeouts, so even though he didn’t walk as much as Yoshida, the bat control was statistically similar.
Ichiro Suzuki did quite well for himself in the major leagues.
I’m not saying that Yoshida is going to have an Ichiro-like career — Ichiro was in his early 20s when he was a bat-control wizard — but if you’re looking for a comparable player who controlled the strike zone like this in the NPB before coming to the majors, that’s all we have. It’s the only comp that even comes close. Even Aoki struck out more when he played in Japan, and that was back before the velocity/strikeout boom of the modern era.
So it’s a done deal, right? We’re all in agreement that this is the hottest free agent of the winter after that very, very tall guy?
Why the Giants might not want Masataka Yoshida
If you followed the offseason coverage last year, you’ll know that I was absolutely in the tank for Seiya Suzuki. Some of the words and phrases used in that profile include “electric talent,” “engaging fan favorite” and “70-grade arm.”
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He was fine with the Cubs this season. No more, no less. He was Austin Slater with a little more power, and that isn’t intended to be dismissive to either player. While I hedged my bets enough to predict his 2022 slash line (.262/.336/.433) almost perfectly …
The average National League right fielder hit .257/.341/.448 last season, and that seems like a fair, realistic starting point when imagining Suzuki in the lineup.
… it still goes to show you how tricky this sort of analysis can be. It’s especially tricky when you can go on Baseball Savant and watch every video of Brandon Nimmo against left-handed pitchers throwing 95 mph or faster to the upper-right quadrant of the zone with two strikes, but you can’t get even close to that kind of granularity in any other league, from the minors to NPB. So we have to pretend it’s 1997 again, point to a fancy BB/K ratio and grunt, “Ratio good. Ratio VERY good.” It’s not that most of this information doesn’t exist — some of it does, if you’re a subscriber — but this is a book report that’s missing a few chapters. There might be good reasons to be worried about Yoshida’s ability to (x), in which (x) stands for something that would be the difference between a helpful platoon player and an everyday All-Star.
(Of course, if you can find a flaw in his swing, I’d love to hear about it, because I’ve watched this 59 times, and I’m not any closer to finding it.)
Masataka Yoshida. Game, set, match. pic.twitter.com/UW4SzSeUri
— Yakyu Cosmopolitan (@baseballcosmo) October 27, 2022
One thing we do have access to, however, are Yoshida’s advanced defensive metrics, and they’re not great. Or even very good. He’s had negative defensive numbers across the board in every season, according to NPB Stats, regardless of metrics. If you’re distrustful of the metrics, here’s one that might convince you: He was a DH more than an outfielder this season. The Giants would like to improve their outfield defense, and Yoshida isn’t the answer. He would have to hit, and quite a bit, to be better than a full-time Austin Slater/Mike Yastrzemski platoon.
Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t. That’s a huge risk in an offseason in which the Giants would prefer cost certainty.
Verdict
This feels like a Giants team that can afford to take that risk. They’re not so close to the top of the NL West that they can’t afford to gamble a little. They’re not so far from the NL wild-card chase that they would be absolutely devastated if they whiffed on an outfield free agent.
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As always, though, it’s not going to be up to the Giants, even if they decide that Yoshida’s otherworldly bat-to-ball skills are exactly what they want. The player has a choice in where he goes, and Yoshida is like a Swiftie, except for Bryce Harper instead of Taylor Swift.
Bryce Harper is his idol.
He originally wore 34 because of Harper, his instagram is "bh_masataka34", etc etc pic.twitter.com/QwV3tmlKnV
— Gaijin Baseball/外国人野球 (@GaijinBaseball) October 31, 2022
The Phillies just won the pennant, the Phillies can always use another outfielder, the Phillies have money, the Phillies are almost certainly going to be interested. If they like what they see, they will take these 1,500 words and use them for dental floss. It reminds me of that old Abraham Lincoln quote:
When a guy puts his dog in a Phillies jersey, he probably wants to play for the Phillies.
And even if Yoshida is a pragmatic sort and isn’t limiting himself to one team, the cold, hard truth is that if the Giants’ analysts like Yoshida, so will the analysts from other teams. There will be a lot of these teams. Why would he choose the Giants? Sure, sure, to play alongside Aaron Judge, but we’re talking about a ballpark that could limit his power more than others. It’s a team that had to turn on the jets to finish .500. There are the Yankees, the Astros, the Braves, the Mets, the Mariners, the Blue Jays, the …
Other teams in California. There are other teams in California.
Yoshida is a fun player to dream on, but I’m pretty sure it’s not up to the Giants. I’ll predict above-average offensive stats for him next season — think .290/.390/.440, real quality stuff — but they won’t be helping the folks at Oracle Park.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have something to take care of.
Hmm, there must be some mistake. Let me try again.
Index of San Francisco Giants free-agent profiles
(Photo: Yukihito Taguchi / USA Today)
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