Ranma wrote:[tweet]https://twitter.com/Buster_ESPN/status/682890791639986176[/tweet]
glad my guessing job hasn't failed me so far this off season
Ranma wrote:[tweet]https://twitter.com/Buster_ESPN/status/682890791639986176[/tweet]
Ranma wrote:From the same guy cited as breaking news of the signing. If I read the details correctly, it's $15 million per year max + the $20 million posting fee for a minimum outlay of $44 million to a maximum of $140 Million over 8 years.
[tweet]https://twitter.com/DfineNrmLC/status/683081568160735232[/tweet]
[tweet]https://twitter.com/BNightengale/status/683083328853942273[/tweet]
Those looking at former Dodger Hiroki Kuroda for optimism may have to look further. Kuroda was a splitter-heavy pitcher, and that pitch famously played up in MLB and led to a successful US career. However, Maeda relies more heavily upon his slider to get batters out. Sliders need high spin to be effective (one thing Maeda has had in a limited pitch fx look, though that was with a non-MLB ball), and splitters rely on low spin. The NPB ball has a different seam height than the MLB ball, so Maeda is essentially hoping for the opposite effect as Kuroda. It’s not a directly comparable situation.
Overall, Maeda could be a good addition to the Dodgers, though at the moment we still know nothing about the contract. He adds starting pitcher depth to a team which needs it, and he doesn’t cost a draft pick. Unfortunately, he’s not a Zack Greinke replacement, so it’s still hard to not be a bit puzzled by what the Dodgers have done this offseason. He’s something like the fourth or fifth number 3-4 starter on the Dodgers, and his floor seems more stable than most. That isn’t bad, but it’s not ideal construction.
At the very least, it’s nice to see a Japanese player back on the Dodgers. It’s been too long.
The general consensus thus far is that he could be a solid, if unspectacular, inning-eating mid-to-back-of-the-rotation starter. Last month, Eno Sarris of FanGraphs looked for a Maeda comp and came up with Kenshin Kawakami, Aaron Nola, Jordan Zimmermann, and Rick Porcello. These names sound decent to me, except for Kawakami. Even if Maeda ended up as a Porcello, there’s still a value in deep leagues. I’d like to throw in another name in this mix: Anthony DeSclafani.
While potential back-end starter I think he could be something more than that. Have you heard of another Japanese righty with excellent command and unimpressive stuff?
Enter Hisashi Iwakuma. When the recent Dodgers signee came over to the big leagues, no one thought he’d be a front-line starter, let alone a top three Cy Young finisher. Even the Mariners, who appeared to be the highest team on him, didn’t think so, using him in a mop-up duty for the first three months.
...
And if your league has the peculiarity of pre-game routine as a category, he’s a must-get.
Quake Griffin wrote:http://www.foxsports.com/mlb/story/los-angeles-dodgers-kenta-maeda-scott-kazmir-zack-greinke-flawed-roster-010116
Jon Morosi hates our offseason.
Apparently we were supposed to sign bot Greinke and Price.
very quick read….I assume to get him some clicks.
"a sense of identity"
lol…whatever that means.
Neddy wrote:with Ranma posting the correction of 25 mil for 8 years rather than 24, the average of base salary still only comes out to just at 3.125 mil per year. that is still a great pay raise from his Japanese salary, and with incentives, he is at the brink of making three, four times of his old salary easily.
nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Top40_salaries_NPB_2015
Ranma wrote:Neddy wrote:with Ranma posting the correction of 25 mil for 8 years rather than 24, the average of base salary still only comes out to just at 3.125 mil per year. that is still a great pay raise from his Japanese salary, and with incentives, he is at the brink of making three, four times of his old salary easily.
nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Top40_salaries_NPB_2015
Thanks for providing the link to the top 40 NPB salaries for 2015, Neddy. The background info is also greatly appreciated to get some context of what's going on over there. I found it interesting that Kenta Maeda, Seung-Hwan Oh, and Yulieski Gourriel were all among those tied for 15th place on the list at $2,5009,500. It's also nice to see Hiroki Kuroda still held in high regard being the 6th highest paid player along with Matsuzaka.
With regard to the Maeda's contract with the Dodgers, we still don't know what the exact details are but it is quite encouraging that multiple sources are reporting the guaranteed portion of the deal to be in the $24-25 million range. I'm hearing that official announcement of his signing may just be waiting for the physical results, which have to be fully completed by January 8th, but it seems like crossing the T's and dotting the i's in contract negotiations are still going on.
Neddy wrote:Kuroda is the man.
not in purely baseball sense alone, as Maeda out pitched his teammate this season easily. but he promised his fans back home he would come back and finish his career as a carp before his body can no longer pitch competitively when he decided to come to US, and he turned down more than 15 million from the yankees to come back and pitch for the carps at a fraction of that the Evil Empire offered. I think I posted about this before, but the story has it that Kurada was granted a FA status once before coming to America, and the Yomiuri GIants pushed hard with a ton of cash to sign Kuroda. but the fans of Hiroshima gathered together at the stadium to appeal to Kuroda to stay, and it touched his heart so much that he turned down significantly more money and the prestige that comes with playing for the mightly Tokyo Giants... and their Yankee-like status to stay and to continue to pitch in the smallest stadium in NPB, with one of the smallest fanbases in that league. one more thing, the Carps stadium being right next to where we bombed them during WW2 with that little thing called A-Bomb where you can see the crator from the 3rd base seats, the fans of Hiroshima are always cheering for, and its players playing for, more than just Ws and Ls there game in and game out.
Ranma wrote:I missed Meola's tweet yesterday stating his assumption that something came up with Maeda's medical examination. I'm curious if there is any truth to this as I was already concerned about his small frame. Having said that, Meola is the only one saying this and it is his own personal conjecture. The purported AAV of the deal obviously safeguards against injury but it would put a damper on the 8-year contract. In any case, an announcement will supposedly be made tomorrow, so hopefully we'll get more details then.
Neddy wrote:BTW, whatever happed with that kid Chuck? is he out of baseball now?
Neddy wrote:
you may have posted this in the past already, knowing how active you are in twitter-verse...or did I say that correctly? lol obviously I don't have a twitter account and never used my office's facebook under my name. this forum is about the only SNS I ever use, if this even counts as one, that is.