Shisa Weblog

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Morris Ragland
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Shisa Weblog

#1 Post by Morris Ragland »

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So far all I've got is this graphic. I'll work more on the substance portion of the blog this weekend. Basically I have two series of writing entries. The Kusonoki first person narrative, and the Shiba Taguchi, Ryukyu Sports News entries. The Kusonoki entries run about six months behind events in the PEBA universe and get re-posted in their own subject heading, as you've seen. The Shiba Taguchi entires are always more timely, and offer an outsider's viewpoint of events as they happen.

Here is where I'll be reposting the Ryukyu Sports News articles written for the PEBA website's splash page. Also, from time to time, I'll have some entries here as myself, not to be confused with the fictional me trying to manage a professional baseball team in Okinawa.
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#2 Post by Leones »

The new graphic looks fantastic. Looking forward to the new blog.
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#3 Post by Morris Ragland »

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More Devil Rays than Diamondbacks


You could think of the former LRS teams as expansion teams, but with the earlier contraction draft in place of an expansion draft. For examples of different outcomes for expansion teams, I look to 1998, when Tampa Bay and Arizona came into existence. Arizona would win its division in its second year of existence. Tampa Bay would take eleven years to accomplish the same feat.

The Shisa came into the PEBA on a downward trend, going through their first losing season in eight years, and losing their sixth consecutive post-season series. The Shisa, like most teams in the LRS weren't really built like major league teams, with only a token farm system and a shallower pool of talent. There just aren't that many big-league players on the roster, and no serious talent in the pipeline. Poised to finish last in the division with the team coming back, a GM is faced with some difficult decisions in the offseason.

Arizona won in 1999 because they spent money like sailors on shore leave. This is not an option in Okinawa, where I'm working with a budget that is 80% of the median PEBA team budget. When you have neither money nor talent, you kinda become a draft and develop franchise whether you want to or not. Building through the draft can be done, the Brewers and Rays have done a good job of it in recent years, but there are plenty of teams who have fallen flat on their fannies as well. It isn't a simple task. It takes years of drafting well, not wrecking prospects, and getting a little bit of luck.

So, the Shisa won't be roaring for a good long while. We'll do what we can with the payroll we've got, but eking out 50 wins in 2021 seems about right for this club.
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#4 Post by roncollins »

The Shisa will definitely be a very interesting team to watch for a few years.
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#5 Post by Morris Ragland »

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Always with Us?
Shiba Taguchi, Ryukyu Sports News Special Report

Naha, Japan - January 10, 2021: In the wake of the LRS merger with the PEBA, unusual events in Japan have caught the attention of baseball fans both here and abroad. One is the formation of a new League of the Rising Sun here in Japan, billing itself as the home of 'real' Japanese baseball. Another is the appearance of Japanese and Korean baseball players with no professional experience, but significant talent, on the free agent market. Naturally, these events have led to a lot of questions and speculation. I spoke with Shisa executives, some on the record, and some who wanted their names withheld, who believe that they have some answers, and that these events are linked.

Shisa head scout Daisuke Wakabayashi spoke on the record regarding this unexpected crop of players. “What you have to understand is just how hidebound the previous professional baseball leagues in Japan were,” says Wakabayashi. “In the LRS, and the NPB before that, if someone didn't play ball in high school or college not only were they not scouted, they weren't eligible to be drafted. It was as though they didn't exist. Capable athletes fell through the cracks, and we're just now discovering them.” The Japanese Amateur Baseball Association, or JABA, oversees the industrial leagues, where adult amateurs continue to compete playing on teams either sponsored by their employer or on club teams, but the LRS more or less ignored these leagues as a source of talent.

Current Shisa third baseman and off-season acquisition Tsukasa Okada stands as a perfect example of a former industrial league amateur turned PEBA pro. “In high school we were discouraged from playing more than one organized sport,” says the thirty-two year old Okada. “I chose soccer.” But trouble with his knees developed when Okada was in his twenties, limiting his ability to run and ending his hopes for a career as a professional soccer player. Okada says that he, like many other athletes from other sports, joined an adult amateur baseball team sponsored by his workplace. “I had just gotten a job at the East Japan Railway at the time as a ticket agent, so I tried out for their team. I had fond memories of playing baseball as a child, and wanted to rekindle my love of the game.” Okada made the team and became a standout third baseman, and as many are learning both here and abroad, he was far from the only world class athlete to be playing baseball in Japan as a near complete unknown.

The recent formation of a new Japanese professional league took many by surprise. It has, somewhat brazenly, taken to calling itself the League of the Rising Sun, and has also, to the surprise of no one, drawn a quick legal response from the PEBA, owner of the LRS trademark. A current Shisa executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, explains that, given the state of turmoil professional baseball in Japan has been in for the past year or so, this perhaps shouldn't have come as a great surprise.

“Several bridges have been burned and enemies made, not just here, but in North America as well. The men who owned and ran MLB and NPB didn't just fade away. They're still with us. And you can see that in the makeup of this counterfeit LRS management, from league offices staffed by former NPB and LRS executives, to the teams managed by former NPB coaches. The purge of these men and women from the game didn't, at a stroke, erase them from existence.” As to the question of ownership, matters are not as clear. “You have ownership groups made up of what look like shell corporations that didn't exist two years ago,” continues my source, “themselves subsidiaries of other entities, owned by shadowy investors and faceless capital funds.”

Not only are these teams of the new LRS fairly well organized, they are extremely well-funded. Public records regarding the initial capitalization of these teams reveals that they almost certainly have budgets to rival PEBA clubs, both those here in Japan and those abroad. I asked my source in the Shisa front office about this. Although he was reluctant to speculate, he said that when MLB folded, the Angeloses, Dolans, Steinbrenners, Wilpons, and Lorias of the baseball world were still very wealthy, still interested in milking the game for whatever profits they could glean from it, and still very much in a mood to strike back at a league that had frozen them out. “Can you imagine how the current state of professional baseball must have sickened them? Teams paying for their own stadiums without fleecing taxpayers? A 'Players' Bill of Rights'? Big league ball abandoning the most lucrative markets? It must have seemed to them like the inmates were running the asylum. The kind of money we're talking about backing this phony LRS couldn't have all come from Japan. It has to come from parties outside the country, parties interested in making over the baseball landscape worldwide. This new league could well prove to be the opening shot in a war on the PEBA itself. First they'll try discredit it in Japan after the historic, but not universally popular, merger. They have the capital to run most of the teams in the Rising Sun Division into the ground, eating into their fan base and also competing for talent.”

In the meantime, while the new LRS is so mired in litigation that it seems doubtful that it will play a single game in 2021, it has had an effect on professional baseball that has been both good and bad. In November, when it first announced its existence, the new league did something not attempted in either of the Japanese major leagues that came before it. It held open tryouts and invited players from across Japan to participate. Most of these players came from the industrial leagues. When the tryouts were first scheduled, Japanese PEBA clubs took notice, even if they at first didn't take the event seriously, says Wakabayashi. “Sure, we sent a guy up there to see who showed up, more out of curiosity than anything else,” says the Shisa head scout. “I hear from him at 10:00 the next morning. 'Boss', he says 'come up here quick. You won't believe it.'” Wakabayashi shakes his head. “He was right, I didn't believe it. Some of those guys were good. Real good.”

Word quickly got around and soon scouts from throughout the PEBA were in Japan checking out the talent. Scouts were so impressed that teams from both the nascent LRS and PEBA began bidding for players who had, a few months ago, been playing simply for the joy of it. Wakabayashi is rueful. “If we had paid more attention to the industrial leagues, we [the clubs of the old LRS] could have kept all those guys to ourselves.” The original association agreement between the LRS and PEBA virtually assured that LRS teams would be the PEBA's only source of Japanese players. Even if the PEBA had scouted the industrial leagues themselves, they could not have signed any players out of them, as the association agreement basically put up a fence around Japan. But nobody scouted the industrial leagues, and nobody saw this coming.

A new professional league looking to cash in on discontent with the state of affairs in Japan, and advertising itself as the home of 'real' Japanese baseball appears to have had an effect on the makeup of the teams of the Rising Sun Division. Many observers and fans who opposed the merger decried it as the death of Japanese baseball, saying that Japanese players, and the Japanese 'style of play' would be washed out of the five teams in Japan, and that the clubs would become 'internationalized', but a look at the rosters tells a different story. A few months removed from the lifting of the gaijin rule limiting the teams to just eight non-Japanese players, no Rising Sun team has more than that number of non-Japanese on its roster. Okinawa signed its eighth gaijin player today, and reportedly is out of the free agent market. Lupin has just four foreign players; Neo-Tokyo and Niihama-Shi, six; and Shin Seiki eight. Officials from the five teams all denied that there is any 'gentleman’s agreement' between the owners or managers regarding the makeup of their teams, but it appears as though they are responding to the pressure to keep their teams 'Japanese'. Of course, time will tell.

For now, many players are getting a chance to shine on an international stage, earning salaries they could only have dreamed of a short time ago. “It doesn't seem real,” says Okada. “I mean, I could never have imagined that a team like Okinawa would be holding a press conference just to announce my signing, with the GM handing me a jersey and cap in front of all those cameras.” The infielder actually looks awestruck. “I was managing an office at a railway station, and now, this!” he says, indicating Shisa Stadium, visible outside the windows of the team offices. For all the headaches that this new league has caused thus far, it may well be worth it to see Okada and his former colleagues of the industrial leagues take the field in the PEBA this spring.
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#6 Post by Borealis »

Excellent write-up Morris! Way to give us some context to this 'new beginning'...
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#7 Post by Apollos »

Borealis wrote:Excellent write-up Morris! Way to give us some context to this 'new beginning'...
This. Really nice job ;-D I had been trying to come up with a way to do it myself, especially in the wak of the Hamada signing.
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#8 Post by Leones »

What an interesting article summarizing the past and current state of the LRS. Great idea and well written. ;-D
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#9 Post by Denny »

Agree with everyone else....this is great explication!
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#10 Post by roncollins »

Yes, quite outstanding. :)
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#11 Post by Lions »

I don't believe for a minute that true Japanese baseball fans will have near the interest in this fake LRS league. Those who care about watching the highest quality baseball will shun this league in favor of the Japanese teams that are now part of the PEBA. I can't imagine that financial support for this league will do anything but shrink. It is a shame, though, that the old LRS was too shortsighted to recognize the baseball talent in their own backyards.
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#12 Post by roncollins »

Lions wrote:I don't believe for a minute that true Japanese baseball fans will have near the interest in this fake LRS league. Those who care about watching the highest quality baseball will shun this league in favor of the Japanese teams that are now part of the PEBA. I can't imagine that financial support for this league will do anything but shrink. It is a shame, though, that the old LRS was too shortsighted to recognize the baseball talent in their own backyards.
This is all true. Bottom line: the dollars that are being thrown around in Japan today are far more than the environment can support--especially given that it's playing to only the sub-section of previous fans who are unable to move on from their clutching to of the past.
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#13 Post by Morris Ragland »

This one was fun to write, knitting together a handful of observations and putting them into a single narrative. Also liked the idea of introducing some antagonists.

Satisfying to see it well-received.
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#14 Post by Morris Ragland »

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Shisa Spring Report


Shiba Taguchi, Ryukyu Sports News

Tuba City, Arizona - March 22, 2021: Shisa executives officially unveiled the team's new spring training facilities two weeks ago, just prior to their first game against Shin Seiki, a game Okinawa lost 6-5. While sportswriters here in the U.S. have projected the Shisa to finish in the middle of the Rising Sun Division, there is a great deal of trepidation surrounding the club as they begin this new era for Japanese baseball.

The Pressing Question: Can Takahiro Ito Come Back?

Since posting a 171 ERA+ and hitting 45 home runs in just 111 starts in the 2019 League of the Rising Sun season, Takahiro Ito has fallen off the baseball map. After he struggled through the start of last season, Okinawa shipped Ito to the AAA squad, where he thrived, giving some hope that he could come back to big league ball. So far this spring, he's again looked outclassed by the pitching he's faced. If the Shisa can't get quality production from Ito, this leads to other troubles as outlined below. The club's Plan B at first base, Akira Goto, at least gives the team a chance.

The Position Battle: The Outfield

There are no real surprises on the horizon for the Okinawa infield, however, the Shisa have seven players competing for five spots in the outfield. LF/RF Kojuro Ishiyama has made the race very interesting this spring. Bucking the trend of most hitters last year, Ishiyama saw his production at the plate increase, his OPS+ jumping from 80 in 2018 to 110. This spring, he has been on a tear (.435/.480/.783). Additionally, the club has been taking a long look at prospect LF/RF Avery Sorensen, who has also had a solid spring. While you might be able to pencil in Trashmaster Morales in center, and Tadamichi Sato (127 OPS+) and Michael Burton (156 OPS+) also appear to be safe bets based on their performances last year, some insiders claim that Sorensen and the two Yanos (Ticky-tacky and Mashashi), all left-handed hitters, are competing for a single spot on the roster. Rule 5 acquisition Mashashi Yano appears to be the front runner here. Outfield depth doesn't appear to be a problem for the Shisa.

The Big Prospect: Isei Yamaguchi

Most scouts agree that Yamaguchi has middle-of-the-rotation upside, but he got hammered in his nine appearances for the Shisa last season (6.15 FIP in 38 innings pitched), and his numbers at AAA (including a distressing tendency to give up home runs) didn't really give observers cause for excitement. This spring, however, he looked good in his first start for Okinawa, four shutout innings against Bakersfield. After the Kokan trade, the Shisa are in need of some solid hands in the starting rotation, though expect to see the club ease Yamaguchi into that role by giving him some innings out of the pen to acclimate him to PEBA hitting.

The Nagging Problem: Dead Money

Of all the teams in the PEBA, Okinawa may be the least able to afford non-productive player contracts, however, they may have a tremendous portion of their 2021 payroll not playing on their active roster in 2021. Ito ($6.4M), Marcos González ($8.4M), Ticky-tacky Yano ($5.4M), and Anthony Hough ($4.6M) could all potentially be left off the Shisa opening day roster. That's $24.8M in salary, on a team with a projected payroll of about $61M, not contributing to the team's success on the field. If it chooses, the club could be rid of three of these players in 2022, but Ito is a long-term problem. He's guaranteed $8M next year, and $10M in the year after that. This was a reasonable contract for a player putting up the numbers he was in 2019, but the club must be looking at this contract in a very different light now.
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Re: Shisa Weblog

#15 Post by Borealis »

It'll be interesting to see how Burton does returning to the States. We always liked him, but his age and cost wrote his ticket off the Front Range...
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