An afternoon sun illuminates the foliage extending in every direction beyond Invoice Seibu Dome on the outskirts of Tokorozawa and casts its natural light into 29,187 spectators through the breach between original grandstands and retrofitted dome. The horizontal band of sunshine circumnavigates the stadium, splitting the fuzzy manmade lumens into two pools, one reflecting from the dome above, the other from the concourses below.
This is Daisuke Matsuzaka's house and the crowd that has gathered within is well aware this could be his final day of home confinement. Speculation has been rampant all summer that Seibu Lions ownership will honor his year-old request to be posted at season's end, thereby paving his way to America. But there are neither tears nor long faces in the seats. Rather, an electric energy ripples through the crowd. This is yakyu — Japanese baseball — at its peak. The second-place Lions are hosting the third-place SoftBank Hawks in this best-of-three first stage that will ultimately decide the Pacific Division delegate to the 2006 Japan Series.
The Lions emerge from their first-base dugout and take the field, a pale-green Astroturf reminiscent of any National League surface with only minimal breaks to accommodate each base and pitcher's mound. But this is the extent of any NL comparison. The Pacific is the younger and more rebellious of the two leagues comprising Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), Japan's MLB equivalent. There is no "Japan League"; the term is a stateside misnomer. And, unlike in the Central League where pitchers bat, Matsuzaka must face a designated hitter each night.
On this Saturday afternoon of what is Columbus Day weekend back in the States, the Seibu Lions' cause will be furthered by the presence of their ace, who takes the mound for warm-ups. They will need it since Lions hitters will be going up against the best pitcher in NPB, SoftBank's Kazumi Saitoh.
As hard as it is to believe, $51.1 million does not even buy MLB's highest bidder, the Boston Red Sox, an exclusive right to negotiate with Japan's best.
Granted, Matsuzaka is not chopped sushi. On the regular season, he finished a close second to Saitoh in every major pitching category: wins (Saitoh 18, Matsuzaka 17), ERA (1.75 vs. 2.13), strikeouts (205 vs. 200), and innings pitched (201 vs. 186). While this is a typical Dice-K season, it has been a career year for the 29-year-old Saitoh, who will soon be the unanimous winner of the Sawamura Award, NPB's equivalent to the Cy Young.
But this afternoon belongs to Matsuzaka. He scatters six hits — along with four hit batsman — over a complete game shutout, striking out 13 and walking none. The only run of the game scores in the bottom of the seventh when the Lions lead off with three straight hits, capped by Kazuhiro Wada's RBI double. Saitoh gives up only one other hit in eight innings of work, striking out nine while walking two, but is the hard-luck loser. Nevertheless, in two days' time, Matsuzaka's Lions will be eliminated by Saitoh's Hawks, two games to one.
This opener was vintage yakyu, where managers sit back and enjoy the pitching performances right along with the fans. Saitoh threw 115 pitches, Matsuzaka 137, and neither bullpen gate so much as creaked, leaving many purists outside Japan longing to see these global treasures swept under the protectionist wings of American baseball.
High pitch counts among Japanese pitchers in general and Matsuzaka in particular have long been a concern among major league scouts and front offices. Possession of this general awareness is one thing, but to be armed with the specifics (forgive the pun) is a sobering matter altogether.
As a 17-year-old, Matsuzaka's 17-inning, 250-pitch performance in the 1998 Koshien Summer Championships is folklore, even in Japanese circles. From there, his iron legend would only grow. By the age of 21, Dice-K had already started 80 games in three big-league seasons (read: no minors), facing almost 2,500 batters in 588 innings of work. That's an average of seven and one-third innings per start.
A 2002 injury wiped out most of Daisuke's fourth season, and upon his return, it was not uncommon for him to throw 150 pitches routinely. In 2005, his seventh in NPB, Matsuzaka started 28 games, with pitch counts ranging from a low of 76 to a high of 160, the latter coming on only his second start of the season. He threw over 100 pitches 25 times, including 4 outings of between 121 and 132, and 11 of more than 132. These last two groupings may sound a bit arbitrary, but they are the definitions of Category 4 and 5 events, respectively, in Baseball Prospectus's Pitcher Abuse Points (PAP) analysis system. Dice-K's average 2005 outing was 122 pitches.
In comparison, this past season seemed like Club Med. In 26 starts, which included his one playoff game against SoftBank, Matsuzaka threw over 100 pitches on 19 occasions. Half his starts were at least of the Category 4 variety (122-plus); six were outright Category 5 (133-plus). His high outing was 145 on September 19 and he averaged 115 per outing, excluding one June start in which a groin pull prevented him from finishing the first inning.
Now, the Seibu Lions, as is common in Nippon Professional Baseball, employ a six-man rotation. Further, with few exceptions, NPB takes Mondays off and never schedules more than six consecutive days of games, meaning Matsuzaka pitched once per week at best. In fact, only one start came on as little as six days' rest. Nonetheless, the damage may have already been done, this according to the gurus at Baseball Prospectus, the think tank as rich in dreaming up objective measurements of subjective factors as they are bankrupt in devising clever names for them. Enter Pitcher Abuse Points.
Introduced in 1999 as a follow-up to Craig Wright's biblical The Diamond Appraised (Simon and Schuster, 1989) and refined in 2001, Pitcher Abuse Points is a system that assigns a numerical stress factor to each pitcher's season based on the sum of his individual abused performances. Abuse points are assigned to each outing in which he throws more than 100 pitches, but are never taken away. The theory is that longer recovery periods do not mitigate the risk of subsequent flat performance or injury caused by an overworked outing. You can't un-ring this bell.
According to Baseball Prospectus rankings, the Diamondbacks' Livan Hernandez was a three-peat stress champion in 2006. With 19 starts lasting over 100 pitches, he topped the Majors with 42 abuse points. Although Hernandez has started no fewer than 30 games since 1997, Boston fans can attest to the pitch-induced wear on their own workhorse. Ace Curt Schilling missed much of the 2005 season recovering from foot surgery, and after a 133-pitch start in Cleveland last April — one of 23 in excess of 100 pitches — he went 2-2 with a 6.46 ERA over his next four outings. Despite this, he tallied a modest 18 abuse points.
Against these numbers, Dice-K's 2006 season blew away the MLB competition. His PAP was a stratospheric 176. The year before was even more draining, as he racked up 284 abuse points in 2005.
Baseball Prospectus uses PAP to quantify a pitcher's probability of incurring a major injury (a DL stint of 30 days or longer), and they have corroboration. Historical injury data does suggest a correlation between PAP and resulting injury. Needless to say, Dice-K has a much higher probability of major injury than any current Major League pitcher according to this particular geek stat. He'd be a riskier investment than Kerry Wood, Carl Pavano, or Boston's own beloved Matt Clement.
In all fairness, although Matsuzaka has not yet paid the injury piper, he may have made a down-payment. However, little data is available on his guarded medical history. As mentioned, he was pulled in the first inning of a game in June due to a groin injury, which also caused him to miss his next scheduled start. In 2002, he posted career lows with 11 starts and 14 appearances, having been removed from the Lions' 28-man active roster on two occasions — once in May and again in August. The latter was reportedly due to a pulled hamstring in his right leg. There was speculation that the May stint was elbow-related, but nothing was ever confirmed.
To most American observers, Matsuzaka's health may be likened to an ear of corn, the decay of whose inner kernels are not betrayed by its thick green husks. Given that, how does the Red Sox front office — or the next, if Thursday's witching hour passes — navigate the repressive state of Japanese injury data?
Inaction may be the best course of action. Scott Boras, Matsuzaka'a agent and current scapegoat for the stalled negotiations, could prove more a lifeboat to Boston's future than a torpedo taking aim at Yawkey Way coffers. Of course, as the recent encumbrance of $106 million for J.D. Drew and Julio Lugo can attest, putting $51.1 million back into the palms of GM Theo Epstein does not ensure a sound future in Red Sox Nation.
One thing is for certain — the temperature is sure to rise on this Hot Stove League come Thursday's midnight hour.
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