8: March, 2020

Spring training is in full swing. There’s a nervous energy in the office, and a prickliness as well. The Shisa haven’t been getting good press lately, and there is some fan discontent over the trades of Yoritomo Masuda and Naomichi Nakagawa, two popular players. Everyone’s just hoping that Naha wins some games, returns to the playoffs, and is able to move on without too much further drama. Winning, of course, cures many ills and would go a long way toward silencing criticism.

Baseball might not be foremost in my mind, however. Since our last meeting I had time to peruse Miss Okano’s blog. I was yet again surprised. Judging from her blog posts, one would suspect that her chief interests are gardening and marine ecology, not wild conspiracy theories. Still, with some sleuthing of my own, I find that I can piece some things together, reading between the lines. There’s an entry about a canceled snorkeling excursion to the reefs around Okidaitō-jima, acompanied by a photo of her and a marine biologist friend, Mr. Saburo Toru, a twenty-something with a swimmers physique and a perfect tan. I contemplate my own mathematician’s physique and LCD monitor tan. I read another entry about the surprisingly small impact of local fishing fleets on the local stocks of tuna. I have to conclude that she’s come by some of her information honestly, even if her conclusions strike me as a bit speculative. Another entry mentions Toru’s wife and children, and I feel relieved. Then I feel ridiculous for having felt relieved.

I punch in the number for an outfit called Deep-Sea Okinawa, charterers of fishing boats. I tell them I am from Honshu, which is true, and want to go fishing around Okidaitō-jima, which is not. The person on the other end of the line is a little bemused by the request and I’m put on hold. A different man comes back on the line to tell me that they don’t commonly do excursions of more than a day and that they can’t go out to Okidaitō-jima anyway. “The helicopters will run you off,” he says. “The Americans call it Area India India. No surface or air traffic allowed. The good news is that there’s no need to go that far out for good fishing. What are you after, yellowfin, mahi mahi, skipjack, marlin?”

I thank the man for his time and hang up. All fish look more or lesss the same on the plate, where I prefer to encounter them. I certainly wouldn’t know a skipjack if it fell out of the sky and flopped around in front of me.

Looking into the matter of further, I notice that Okinawa is itself surrounded by a patchwork of over twenty of these military training areas. No go zones for vessels, aircraft, or both. Okidaitō-jima doesn’t seem all that different from other areas, it seems to me, but I’m getting a clearer idea of how Okinawa is burdened by the military presence here.

I leave the office for a moment to clear my head, or at least bring back around to baseball. I begin to wonder whether anyone’s monitoring my browser cache at work and what they might make of my activity. I decide in the future to do my outside research at an internet cafe.

I pass by the office of Yasuhiko Otomo, another analyst. He’s the other side of the development coin, you might say. While I’m concerned with modeling the development of individual players. He trawls league statistics to spot broader trends. Otomo is a little on the doughy side, and wears round-rimmed spectacles. He likes to say that he’s forest, and I’m trees, which sounds fair to me. The door is open and I see Joe Hubbard looking over Otomo’s shoulder. Hubbard is an American, a former second baseman for the Magami Akos, as the Shisa were known in 2008, the only year Hubbard played in Japan. Hubbard will be the first to tell you that he wasn’t anything special as a ballplayer, but he’s made a decent executive; special assistant to the general manager.

“That’s great, Otomo,” says Hubbard, “but what do we do with it?”

“It’s a completely different scoring environment. So, you judge offensive performance with that in mind, and remember that the sky isn’t falling,” replies Otomo.

Curious, I stick my head in the door. “What are you looking at?” I ask.

Hubbard turns towards me. “Otomo here has declared this the year of the pitcher.”

“Not quite,” says Otomo. “It won’t be like 2009, but it will be different.”

“And how did you arrive at that?” I ask.

“Oh, some crude, back of the cocktail napkin stuff,” says Otomo, pointing at one of the three monitors on his desk. I see league pitching statistics, but not the LRS.

“These are MLB stats,” I say.

“That’s right,” says Otomo, “the MLB expanded six times in its history, and five of those times the league ERA went up the next year. See, 1961, 1962 (our outlier), 1969, 1977, 1993, and 1998.”

“They watered down the pitching,” says Hubbard.

Otomo nods and continues. “My thesis is that in a contraction year you will see the league ERA fall in proportion to the number of teams removed, a mirror image of these expansion seasons in MLB.”

“How much?” I ask.

“When you take away a third of the teams in a league? This much,” says Otomo pointing to a number on a spreadsheet on another monitor.

My eyes widen, “Point eight six? Are you serious?”

“Well,” says Otomo, who clicks on his mouse and shows me his formula. He took the average increase in the size of the league in the expansion years and divided it into the average change in ERA in those same seasons. “It’s just an educated guess, really, but I came up with a 0.0259623 change in ERA for each per cent of change in the number of pitching slots league wide. We’ll see if it works down as well as up. Zero point eight six for a 33% change might be a little exaggerated. 1969 is a problem. Not only did they add four teams, a twenty percent increase, but they lowered the mounds because 1968 was nuts. A league ERA of 2.98. The jump in 1969 was 0.63, which itself is dramatic, but it’s hard to take everything into account.”

“A lot of guys were throwing a spitter in the sixties, too,” adds Hubbard.

“Last year, LRS league ERA was 4.70,” continues Otomo, “so I’m predicting a league ERA of 3.84 this year.”

League ERA had been drifting up pretty much since 2009, and had been above 4.00 for six straight seasons now. According to Otomo, that is all about to come crashing down and the party will be over for LRS hitters in 2020.