Shiba Taguchi, Ryukyu Sports News

Naha, Okinawa – March 31, 2020: “Well, is he crazy, or was he drinking?” one fan asked me at the start of spring training this year. ‘He’ is Shisa GM Morris Ragland. A rhetorical question, to be sure, but I answered him nevertheless, “I don’t know. Let’s see the product on the field first.” In an off-season best described as ‘chaotic’, Naha in particular has made moves with no easily discernible pattern or plan. With some outside help, I’ll look at these in the order they were completed and try to make sense of it.

November 7:

The Shisa traded away pitcher ‘Slappy’ Bradley and $5M to Hyakujuu for right fielder Avery Sorensen. This first deal of the 2019-2020 off-season really set the tone for what was to come in Naha. Bradley was set to make in excess of $8M in 2020, but had ceased to be a reliable starter. The new management team had never been happy with Bradley’s contract, and needing to shed some payroll. They moved him for a AAAA right fielder. Bradley found himself subsequently passed over in the LRS contraction draft, with no team willing to pick up his contract, and in free agency, with no team in the LRS or PEBA signing him. Bradley did eventually sign with Moca of the Dominican League. We may never know what became of that $5M.

November 31:

The Shisa and the seven other remaining LRS teams participated in the league contraction draft. Naha took the ‘Meineke’ approach to the draft. They weren’t going to draft any players with sizable major league contracts. The Shisa picked up a lot of young pitching not making a lot of money, taking ‘Grim Reaper’ Kokan in the first, Kokei Yamashita in the second, Kyoji Uchiyama in the third, Mark Walker in the fourth, Suezo Kikuchi in the fifth, and ‘Yoshi’ Yamamoto in the sixth round of the draft. This give us some sense of the displeasure the Shisa front office had with the bullpen last season, picking up four relievers in one day. Kokan and Yamashita both project to be solid starters, and should be for several seasons to come.

December 1:

Naha’s first move in December, after the league merger was officially announced. Despite the team owner’s uncharacteristically vocal stance in opposition to the designated hitter rule, the team’s first free-agent signing was Anthony Hough to a 3-year, $13.8 million contract. The 34 year old veteran designated hitter/first baseman played for the New Jersey Hitmen of the Planetary Extreme Baseball Alliance for nine seasons, accumulating a career OPS+ of 114. He hit 42 home runs for the Hitmen in 2017, but saw his production decline in the next two seasons, which likely is what made him expendable in New Jersey. Naha appeared to be gambling on a League of the Rising Sun resurgence for Hough, which had paid off the season before with third baseman Rod Young (the 2019 Saiyu-shu-senshu winner in the LRS Bright Blade Group), and left fielder Lyle Ward (164 OPS+). This gamble appears more likely to pay off than not. So far in spring training Hough is knocking the ball all over the yard, not only collecting 25 hits in 71 at-bats, but tallying 14 walks versus 12 strikeouts for an OPS of 1.064.

December 8:

After a free agent signing apparently designed to improve the Naha offense, the team began the winter meetings by trading away perhaps the most popular player on the team, right fielder Yoritomo Masuda, and signing his apparent replacement, Tadamichi Sato, on the same day. The Masuda trade has been the subject of much commentary already, and has thus far been unpopular with Shisa fans and industry insiders alike. The Sato signing has been more or less disregarded.

Since the announcement of the league merger, American baseball writer Hiram Mosley has turned his attention to the LRS, and has made a study of this deal in particular. In this trade, Naha sent Masuda and $1.5M to Shin Seiki in exchange for minor league outfield prospect Shinzo Kiyomizu. According to Mosley, who has interviewed executives for both teams involved, the deal announced on the 8^th was not the deal the teams had originally agreed to.

“The timing of this one is a little deceiving,” says Mosley. “The Masuda trade negotiations actually took place before November 15^th.” This was before any LRS scandal had even been rumored, and while the two leagues were still under the original ‘October Framework’. “The new relationship between the leagues was only a couple weeks old at this point, with the original trade restrictions still in place,” adds Mosley. While officials from the Shisa and Evas have consistently declined to comment on record, there are indications that Naha later approached Shin Seiki seeking to cancel or change the original deal.

“Naha was in a tough spot here,” says Mosley. “They had probably figured out by then that they could get much more for Masuda on the new trade market, and I think hoped that the Evas would pick up a strong outfielder in the contraction draft and both parties could walk away from the trade,” but the Evas liked the deal for obvious reasons. “Shisa management didn’t want to lose face and renege on the deal, figuring if they did so, they probably wouldn’t have any dealings with Shin Seiki in the future,” says Mosely. Burning bridges now could hurt the team in the future, so Naha went forward with the Masuda trade, “holding their noses as they did so,” notes Mosley.

“I’m not sure how closely the PEBA teams were looking at what players the LRS teams were putting on the block at that point. Plus, you had Hyakujuu sucking all the oxygen out of the room,” says Mosley, referring to large volume of communications coming out of the Shinkansen front office during this period. “Everybody else was moving in slow motion by comparison.” Reviewing communications logs filed with the league office in the wake of recent scandals, it appears that Hyakujuu also contacted Naha regarding a Masuda deal, but was rebuffed. According to an anonymous front office source, Shisa management were getting increasingly frustrated with the pace of deal making in Hyakujuu. Naha found itself devoting more and more time to just reviewing the moves the Shinkansen were making. Thus a scenario wherein Naha traded away Masuda, only to get him back in a contraction draft, didn’t come to pass.

Naha would have had to work extra hard to draw attention to Masuda in this environment, and they simply didn’t do it. Said new Transmitters General Manager Matt Higgins of the deal, “Naha got too little in return for Masuda. Especially with a team like Bakersfield in the market for offensive upgrades. I would be curious about how hard Naha actually shopped Masuda.” According to Mosley, most PEBA teams weren’t even aware Masuda was on the market by the time the Shisa closed negotiations. “Did they do their due diligence on this one? It appears that they did not,” concludes Mosley. One person who has not said a single word about Masuda since the deal was consummated is Dr. Nam-sup Chong, Shisa head trainer. Did the Naha training staff know something, or think they knew something, about Masuda that Shin Seiki’s doctors did not?

According to Mosley, the Shisa front office was not of one mind regarding the Masuda trade, and while one can certainly make a case for trading Masuda to another team, it’s hard to make a case for the value of what Naha got back. Neo-Tokyo GM Ron Hi summed it up when he said at the time, “[Shin Seiki] brings in a game changer and gets paid to do so, giving up a spec that probably didn’t figure in their plans. [Shin Seiki GM] Kevin [Vail] does it again.” Kiyomizu is projected to be a fringe prospect at best, and unlikely to rise above the triple-A level.

A faction within the Naha camp seemed determined to ship Masuda off for whatever price, and this faction carried the day. The reaction within the BBG to the departure of Masuda has been unanimous. Other teams are thrilled to see Masuda playing in the other division. “[I]t’s always nice to see an All-Star caliber player leaving the BBG,” noted Lupin GM Ron Collins. “Never in the fields of the LRS was so much owed by so few to ol’ Masu,” said Edo GM Patrick Hildreth. However, Masuda had been spending an increasing amount of time on the disabled list in recent years, starting only 126 games in 2018 and 2019. “Masuda was injured three times in 2019, and each time the projected recovery time got longer and longer. Management was pulling their hair out,” says Mosley. While the fans and the rest of league see a four-time all-star and a Gurabukin winner, the new management team saw a player whose value to the Shisa was dropping precipitously, contributing 6.1 Wins Above Replacement in 2017, 3.9 WAR in 2018, and just 1.8 WAR in 2019 (sixth on the team among position players).

Another complication for Naha has been financial. Playing in the smallest market in the LRS, the Shisa have consistently had media contracts lagging behind the rest of the league, hampering their revenue growth despite having the second highest gate receipts in the league. Even with revenues in the LRS poised to jump considerably, Naha finds itself slipping behind the league leaders. Add to this the fact that several front offices in the league have frankly failed to keep pace with the changes to the financial picture, the Shisa not least of all. “The bean counters really got whipsawed on this one,” says Mosley. Teams find themselves stuck with their old LRS budgets while they are projecting PEBA comparable revenue levels for 2020 and beyond. This discrepancy will correct itself with time, but in 2020 some teams are hamstrung. Clubs like Naha just can’t afford to carry any dead weight.

For now, Tadamichi Sato might the forgotten man among Shisa fans, but may not be for long. Naha acquired the right fielder the same day it dealt Masuda. Preseason projections have lightly regarded Sato as an offensive replacement, noting his pedestrian numbers for PEBA Duluth, but so far this spring Sato has feasted on LRS pitching, leading all right fielders in both average and on base percentage. Perhaps most importantly for Naha, Sato’s making about half the salary that was due Masuda in 2020.

December 9:

The Shisa traded minor league third baseman Sidney Pelikaan to the Reno Zephyrs in exchange for center fielder ‘Trashmaster’ Morales. Team sources say that the Naha scouting department was never very high on Pelikaan, whom they believed would always struggle to make consistent contact. On top of this, Pelikaan didn’t have the sort of elite defense that the front office seems to be favoring at the moment. The Shisa were looking for an economical upgrade in center field, as Manabu Kawano, acquired last off-season from the Evas, never really caught on in 2019, just barely hitting above his weight (.215/.286/.404). Morales seemed to fit the bill, with decent on-base skills and still impressive speed on the base paths. He’s off to a slow start this spring, however, and may yet lose out to Kawano if he can’t improve on his .220 average.

December 10:

Naha’s winter of Antónios continued when they traded a second and third round draft pick to Lupin for shortstop António Pérez. His hitting has historically been about league average (though he’s put up a surprisingly robust .857 OPS so far this spring), but it’s his glove that makes Pérez special. Team leader Rod Young has taken to calling the area between second and third ‘the event horizon‘. “Nobody breaks on a ball like António and he can make the throws. Deep in the hole. On his knees, whatever. Having him at short lets me play closer to the line, like this,” says Young, straddling the foul line just behind third base. The team has experimented with playing Young (by no means a poor defender himself) at DH versus left-handed starters and putting defensive specialist Sadahige Seki at third, giving Naha perhaps the best infield defense on the planet.

December 15:

For the cost of a telephone call, the Shisa received a raft of career minor leaguers from Lupin: 3B Katsunan Watanabe, P Yukinaga Ikeda, P Ieyoshi Fujii, P Shoji Yoshida, and CF José Martínez. None of these players are projected to make the big leagues, but are useful minor league depth for a team needing to expand it minor league rosters.

December 26:

The Shisa posted popular starting pitcher Naomichi Nakagawa [broken link], another impact player set for a significant pay raise in 2020. The high bid of $4M would come from Charleston. Aside from a rising salary, it’s hard to find anything wrong with Nakagawa. He started 26 or more games for Naha in five straight seasons, with a career 3.31 ERA. Mosley speculates that the Shisa front office was so enamored of the Kokan acquisition that Nakagawa, and his $6.8M salary, became expendable.

Charleston GM Mark Kierstead, formerly of Kuwana, likely knew exactly what he was getting in Nakagawa; another solid arm for an already fairly solid rotation.

January 7:

In need of a back-up catcher, Naha signed free agent José Amézaga. By no means an offensive standout for West Virginia, Amézaga is a decent defensive catcher who may even be able to get his average above the Mendoza line this season in Japan.

Conclusion:

So how to explain these moves by Naha? Mosley believes that these are the sorts of transactions you get when a team’s accounting and budgeting practices are broken. A team’s payroll, player development, and scouting budgets are set in the off-season, and are based upon the overall team budget for the following year. The problem Naha ran into, says Mosley, is two part.

“First, there is the failure of team budget writers to account for new revenue forecasts,” says Mosley. “The Shisa are going to clear $100M in revenue this season easily, but they’re saddled with a budget of $87M, plus they’re taking on new expenses with raises to the league minimum salary, and two new minor league teams. Ultimately this is a failure of ownership to react to changing circumstances in a timely manner. It’s not really the league’s job to police the owners. It’s up to the general managers to beg for the money. I guess Naha’s managers aren’t good at begging.”

“Second, the accounting practices in both leagues force teams to limit their off-season spending to the budgets set in the off-season, which don’t take into account cash on hand,” continues Mosley. “If the team spends over budget, the player development and scouting budgets get axed according to the league accounting rules. Fiscally, these guys were doing everything right, paying into the revenue sharing fund, spending far less than they made, and they still got punished. Naha had this big pile of money coming into the off-season, a league maximum carry over of $25M, but they couldn’t touch it except to give it away in these trades to cut payroll, rather than use it to pay the players they already had. It’s insanity.”

“It gets even better,” notes Mosley. “This financial crush gets magically lifted when spring training starts. Once the league moves from off-season to spring the budgets are locked, the player development and scouting budgets are safe, and the team can finally spend their cash on players. If the Shisa front office were more savvy, maybe they could have moved their players to other teams with budget room in a series of straw deals, getting players off the payroll during the off-season, and then bringing them back in the spring, essentially renting that budget room from another team.”

Sources in the Shisa front office indicate that projected budgets for 2021 are currently more in-line with PEBA revenue levels and that the “hiccup” of 2020 won’t likely be repeated going forward. Perhaps lost amid the criticism of the team’s ability to transition into the new-look LRS in 2020 and the PEBA in 2021 is a full appreciation of what was asked of the LRS teams and league executives in a few short days. Barely two weeks separated the revelation of collusion and fraud and the contraction draft. That the organizations involved moved as quickly and efficiently as they did really is a feat of which they ought to be proud, even if it wasn’t perfect. All involved should be commended for their efforts to preserve professional baseball in Japan.