The new fifth highest-paid pitcher in baseball history has never played Major League Baseball. The Yankees are giving Japanese mega-ace Masahiro Tanaka a seven-year contract worth $155,000,000 (with an opt-out after four years and a measly $88 million). Just who in the world is this guy?
Who Is Masahiro Tanaka
Tanaka is a Kansai-born, Hokkaido-bred pitching machine with what everyone is telling me is the best split-finger fastball in the world. A split-finger or splitter is a pitch that looks like a fastball then breaks sharply downward before it reaches the plate, and it’s thrown while holding the ball with the index finger on one side of the ball and the middle finger on the other end, with a large gap or “split” between your fingers at the top. Japan, for some reason, is really into the splitter. And guess what? Tanaka’s got one of the most deceptive splitters in the world, and that (combined with the Yankees’ dearth of pitching, Tanaka’s monster stats with the Rakuten Golden Eagles, the baseball TV rights money bubble, the outsized merchandising revenue earned for Japanese players, and the relatively recent in historical terms development of an international free market) is why he’s getting $155 million before he’s even shown what he can do in America.
Like most Japanese stars, Tanaka first reached the spotlight in the mega-popular Koshien high school baseball tournament, which he helped Tomakomai High School win in 2004 and 2005. It wasn’t until 2006 however that he really became a celebrity, when he dueled Jitsugyo High School and their ace Yuki Saito, “The Handkerchief Prince” (he wiped his sweat off with a handkerchief during games).
If this doesn’t sound like a baseball anime waiting to happen, I don’t know what does.
Tanaka and Saito faced each other in the Koshien final, with Tanaka coming on in relief in the third inning then going the distance, matching Saito in a 1-1 draw until the 15th inning, when rules called for an almost unheard-of Koshien finals rematch. Incredibly, Tanaka and Saito would pitch again the next day, resulting in a 4-3 victory for Saito and Jitsugyo. These two games made celebrities out of both Tanaka and Saito, and it was a huge event when, five years later, they faced each other in Nippon Professional Baseball. This time, Tanaka was the 4-1 victor, and he even expressed great disappointment that he didn’t manage to shut out Saito’s Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. The two pitchers would earn parallel nicknames: Ma-kun and Yu-chan.
Unlike Saito, Tanaka would declare himself for the NPB draft to enter the pros, and he very quickly became the ace starter for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, a team based in Miyagi Prefecture in the northeast that got started in 2005. Like all Japanese professional teams, the Eagles are named after and primarily known by their primary sponsor company’s name, in this case the Amazon-like online retailer Rakuten. With Rakuten, Tanaka has been nothing short of spectacular. He started pitching professionally for the team when he was just 18, and his career ERA is a preposterous 2.30 with a career record of 99-35 (oh come on, why didn’t he get one more win?).
People really started to speculate that Tanaka might come to America after his 2013 season, in which he went 24-0 with a 1.27 ERA, then won six more games in the postseason to give the Eagles their first Japan Series title. What’s funny is 2013 wasn’t even his best season. That would be 2011, when Tanaka again had a 1.27 ERA in 27 starts, threw sixty more strikeouts than in 2013, gave up fewer walks, pitched more innings, and yet only went 19-5. A lot of people would call those “video game numbers,” but I’ve never pitched for stats like that in any video game.
And I’m sure you’re asking “Okay, great, so he can pitch. But can he dance along with a Japanese idol group?” The answer to that is “not really.” But please watch the video below to see Ma-kun say “Pi-pi-pi-pi-pitchingu, ca-ca-ca-ca-catchingu, cha-cha-cha-cha-charmingu.”
Munenori Kawasaki definitely still reigns supreme in terms of dancing.
So, Masahiro Tanaka’s a pretty amazing guy. Let’s see how he got to the MLB (it wasn’t via dancing, I can tell you that).
How He Got Here
Japanese players who are still under contract for their NPB team are sold to MLB teams through the “posting system,” which has traditionally been designed to get as much money as possible for the team while forcing the player to accept a below market-value contract. With Yu Darvish and every other Japanese player posted before this year, MLB teams entered a blind auction, with the auction winner giving millions to the NPB team and earning the exclusive right to sign their player. That’s why Yu Darvish, despite having nearly the same credentials as Tanaka, signed a contract worth a hundred million dollars less, because once the Rangers had paid their posting fee, he had to either sign with them or stay in Japan.
This year, the posting system became much more player-friendly. The Japanese team names a posting fee (with a max of $20 million), and any MLB team willing to pay that much gets a right to negotiate a contract with the player, with only the player’s eventual team having to actually pay the fee. So Tanaka got to enjoy the attention of virtually every Major League team, as they all squabbled and fought over who could give him the biggest contract. He could even theoretically choose a smaller contract if he wanted to play for a certain team, as many people thought he might when rumors insisted that his wife Mai Satoda wanted to live on the Pacific coast. Early reports suggest that he did however choose the largest contract, as the Yankees outbid the Dodgers, Cubs, White Sox, and Astros to secure Ma-kun.
So, the money, the glory, the city, and the probable playoff games are what called Tanaka to the Yankees. What Japanese person doesn’t want to go to New York, though? The only thing that could be possibly more tempting is the Angels’ proximity to Disney Land.
What Will Tanaka Do In The MLB?
Okay, so Tanaka might have lit Japan up with his split-finger fastball, but the NPB is not the MLB. Major League Baseball dropouts Wladimir Balentien and Matt Murton have the single-season home runs and hits records in Japan, so it’s not as strong a league. Every Japanese pitcher has seen their stats drop as they come into the MLB, but how much? Tanaka could afford to drop a half-point of ERA and still be the best pitcher in the American League next year. And Tanaka is, after all, still only 25 years old, and baseball players traditionally peak in their age 27 season. How will he pitch?
One site specializes in projecting Japanese players’ stats for if they joined the MLB, and it lays out the following statline for Masahiro Tanaka: 8.8 strikeouts per 9 innings pitched, 2.9 walks/9, and a 3.59 ERA. This statline would make him ace-quality, but not anywhere near the god-quality he had in Japan, and not as good as fellow Japanese international Yu Darvish has been in the States.
Baseball stat site Fangraphs raises a few more questions about Tanaka: Will his thousands of high-stress pitches in high school wear out his arm too soon? And will his relative lack of strikeouts for a pitcher so dominant hurt him in the MLB, where what used to be ground balls in Japan may now become line drives and home runs? It remains to be seen, and now I’ll be forced to watch Yankees games to find out. Welcome to the MLB, Masahiro Tanaka. Welcome to the MLB…
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