1: August, 2019

 My name is Kusonoki Konoye. Chances are that you’ve never heard of me. I work as a baseball operations assistant for the Naha Shisa, a professional baseball team. Until a few years ago I knew nothing of baseball. I’m not exactly what you’d call ‘athletic’. Back then I was a graduate student in mathematics; treading water a bit, to tell the truth. I certainly wasn’t headed for an academic career with my marks, and financial analysis (and its ‘lifestyle‘) was of no attraction to me. But I have a head for statistics, as you might say. I just needed a proper fit for my talents and inclinations.

 My roommate and best friend, Taki, was, and still is, a big Arsenal fan. When Kure was in town, he would drag me to the games. The baseball was interesting, but the statistics were fascinating; athletic performance described in a myriad of different ways, but all incomplete, with none telling you the entire story of a player (his ability to run, catch, hit, and throw). Understanding the limitations of our statistical methods is often as important as developing them in the first place, for the failure to correctly interpret statistics leaves us no better off than we were before, often worse off, in fact.

 And so it was that I came to write my thesis on wOBA. Well, not wOBA, exactly, but the values of an unintentional walk, hit by pitch, a stolen base, a caught stealing, a single, a double, a triple, and a home run in the League of the Rising Sun, for the 2017 season. Well, not the values so much as the definition of ‘run environment’, which helps you get to the values. Sixty pages, in all. Riveting reading, I’m told; sarcastically, more often than not.

I successfully defended my thesis and the job offers just came pouring in. Actually, that’s a lie. Nothing happened, for months, a year, nothing. Then, in January, I got a phone call. It was from Daisuke Wakabayashi, head scout for the Shisa, who happens to be into sabermetrics, and is, frankly, one of the best scouts in the game today, because he understands the limitations of sabermetrics. He had actually read my thesis and offered me this job on behalf of Seigyoki Kabushiki Gaisha, known as the Seigyoki Corporation in North America, a multinational corporation and conglomerate with a broad range of products and services, from plumbing fixtures, to power tools, to weapons guidance systems. Seriously, weapons guidance systems.

The Shisa, apparently, are a favorite plaything of the majority shareholder of Seigyoki Corp., Iyou Seigyoki, grandson of the founder of Seigyoki Corporation, Fumihiko Seigyoki. You all probably know the story with Seigyoki, the son of Japanese parents, whose mother went into labor three weeks early while the two were vacationing in San Francisco. Being born in America of Japanese parents, Seigyoki was able to claim dual citizenship. He now lives in Seattle, home of Seigyoki Corp’s electronics operations. Word is that he’s really into Pearl Jam, and overcast skies, I guess.

Anyway, Wakabayashi offered me the job on behalf of the new general manger. My task was to work on research and development; to develop our understanding of the data we collect. Also, I work on player evaluation, both on the amateur and professional levels. More easily said than done, to be honest. The two tasks are not entirely unrelated, and player evaluation is far from an exact science, as any front office executive will tell you in a moment of candor. And developing a method of evaluating a player’s defensive abilities remains the white whale of contemporary statistical analysis. Plus, how do you accurately project the development of a 17 year old player? It’s quite a challenge. And then there’s the weirdness of working at Seigyoki Corporation. You have no idea.