Shiba Taguchi, Ryukyu Sports News

Tuba City, Arizona – March 13, 2022: The Shisa gear up for 2022, hoping for an improved record, though most experts don’t foresee much success for Okinawa in the coming year. Executives have worked hard to bring in players to help the team, but may be forced to watch that same team evaporate at the end of the season, regardless of on-field results. In the clubhouse, the mood is mostly positive, but in the boardroom there is tension and anxiety as executives contemplate an uncertain future and a crisis not of their own making. The Shisa are a team isolated on a small island, both literally and figuratively. A club whose off-season efforts to improve seem to have been ignored by the larger baseball world, and beset by an angry and capricious sea of rules indifferent to its successes.

The Pressing Question: Will the New Acquisitions Make a Difference?

The Shisa had a very busy off-season, adding ten players to the active roster (eleven, if you count Salvador Rodríguez, who starts the spring on the disabled list) in an effort to improve on the team’s lackluster 61-101 record last year. The baseball press has greeted this influx of talent to Okinawa with a collective yawn, with most pre-season polls predicting that the Shisa will make, at best, marginal gains in the won-lost column, and some actually predicting that Okinawa will regress in 2022. Much depends on how well the new pieces fit into place.

The Shisa added three starters to bolster an alarmingly bad 2021 rotation. Only one pitcher with fifteen or more starts last season (Yoshiaki Rin) posted an ERA below 5.00. The front office went out and acquired three affordable starters on the free agent market, Chris Graves, Livewire Hendricks, and Alex Stinnett. While none of the three is an all-star candidate, all are ground ball pitchers who should have some success pitching to contact with the Shisa infield defense behind them.

Okinawa also added a couple of right-handed relief pitchers, two-time all-star Michael Ayers and Fernando García. The Shisa specifically needed to fill the gap left by departing reliever Marcos González, who is now with Rio Grande Valley, and to improve right-handed relief depth in general.

Third baseman Scott Morris is the only new Shisa position player to get a multi-year deal this off-season. He fills the void at the hot corner in the wake of the trade of Tsukasa Okada to Kalamazoo. A longtime Underground stalwart with a career OPS of .742, and who has shown flashes of brilliance in the past (3.8 WAR in 2019), Morris is out to prove that he still can play at a high level.

Playing alongside Morris in the left half of the Shisa infield will be journeyman shortstop Rusty MacCune. MacCune has superlative defensive ability, but hadn’t been able to stick with a big league club in the past due to lack of production at the plate. Philosophically, the Okinawa front office seems comfortable sacrificing offense for defensive prowess at short and prizes defense up the middle in general. MacCune may be an everyday starter on this club.

The Shisa answered any lingering questions about whether Red Hook would be rushed to the big league club this season by acquiring two first basemen with one-year deals. Dax O’Mannis is a right-handed hitter with an .884 lifetime OPS against left-handed pitching. His counterpart, the left-handed hitting first baseman known as El Chupacabra (Octávio Pexego), has a lifetime OPS of .871 against right-handed pitching. Okinawa first basemen had a collective WAR of -2.4 last season, so the acquisition of these two hitters could alone account for 5+ wins in 2022 over the previous year.

In the outfield, the Shisa went out and got an inexpensive center fielder, Mario Martínez. While he was nothing special at the plate last season in Duluth (.239/.314/.368), his ranginess in the outfield propelled him to a WAR of 1.9 in 124 starts for the Warriors, and he is three years removed from a 3.9 WAR season in Palm Springs. Sources in the Okinawa front office say that he has tremendous defensive instincts, getting good jumps on hard hit balls and making up for sub-par foot speed.

There is also Rule 5 pick Salvador Rodríguez to consider. While he is currently nursing a broken knee back to health, Rodríguez could be poised for good things in what will be his rookie year. Sources within the Shisa organization describe him as a “natural born thumper,” who has had success everywhere he’s been in the Kalamazoo organization.

The Position Battle: Second Base

There are three holdovers battling for a starting spot at second this season: Gigolo Komatsu, António Pérez, and Sadahige Seki. Any of the three should be tremendous in the field, though none have excelled at the plate since the transition to the PEBA. All three bat right handed so the situation doesn’t seem to favor a platoon at the position, though sources say that skipper Kijuro Yoshida may be favoring a split of Komatsu and Perez at that spot. Regardless of the outcome, Okinawa is poised to have a double play combination that should be the class of the league in the coming season, which they’ll need with a rotation that isn’t going to be striking a lot of batters out.

The Big Prospect: Salvador Rodríguez

Salvador means ‘savior’ in Spanish. That’s quite a name to try and live up to. The one blessing for Rodríguez coming up to this team and at this time is that he is under very little pressure to be ‘the guy’ in the Shisa lineup. Expectations for this team are not high, and the need for an impact bat for a team not expected to be in contention is therefore not great. Okinawa isn’t looking for a savior, just an every day left fielder. While most scouts are high on Rodríguez’s skills, there are some questions about his drive and commitment to improving his game. Early and sustained success at the major league level could answer those questions, but a protracted struggle at the plate may end a career just as it begins. Rodríguez experienced some struggle transitioning from college to minor league ball, and overcame it. Will he have to do the same transitioning from the minors to big league ball?

The Nagging Problem: Accountants

Thanks to new financial reporting rules put in place in the wake of the scandals that ultimately brought down the old LRS, we know quite a bit about team finances. For 2022, the Shisa are estimating net revenues of $133M, excluding revenue sharing from the previous year. This would be an increase in income of nearly 27%. Revenue from tickets sales is projected to increase from $62.8M in 2021 to $80.2M in 2022. The Shisa’s media contract has increased from $30.25M in 2021 to $42.75M in 2022. While you’d think this would be cause for rejoicing in the Shisa front office, you would be wrong. Okinawa is spending nearly every penny available to the club this season, and this is actually a very big problem.

Baseball accounting rules, which one executive who wished to remain nameless described as ‘perverse’, require a team to assume that spending levels on things like player development and scouting will be unchanged year-to-year; spending over which the team has total control. Further, when budgeting for player salaries, a team must assume that all team options will be exercised and that all arbitration-eligible players will be retained. Again, things over which the team has total control. Additionally, some teams, such as Okinawa, are stuck with projected budgets for future years only incrementally higher than their current season’s budget and at variance with current income levels.

For the Shisa, this could bring the club to its knees in the coming year. There currently is a massive divide between the team’s current budget of $103.5M, and its expected revenue of $133M. This divide persists when planning for future years. In 2023 and 2024, the team is forced into a budget of $104M (a mere half-million dollars higher than in 2022), which completely ignores the changing financial picture of the club. These budgets also curiously slash expected media revenues by $11M, for no apparent reason. The short of it is that the Shisa are projected to outspend their 2023 budget by some $26M ($130M in expenses versus a budget of $104M). Of that projected 2023 spending, $41.5M of it is tied up in team options on player contracts that the club can decline, and scouting and player development budgets that simply carry over to the following year, but over which the team also has full control in fact but not in theory. Unless the situation is remedied, the team will be unable to retain any of its players or personnel whose current contracts don’t already cover the 2023 season.

Says one front office source, “We are spending the money available to us to improve this franchise both in the near and long-term. This is good for baseball and the health of the PEBA on the whole, but we are about to be punished for it in a very dramatic way. It is beyond frustrating. We could double our revenues from the previous year and it won’t matter. This team is not in financial distress, but we’re going to be treated as if we are.”