Sox Looking to sign 22-year old Japanese Pitcher .

[NateGrey]

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> http://www.npbtracker.com/2008/09/red-sox-sign-tazawa/

 

 

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[Cocos Disciples]

From the same site:

Okay Red Sox, Braves, and Orix Buffaloes fans — I did a little more digging on Junichi Tazawa and found some pretty good stuff.

 

* Deanna attended Tazawa’s most recent game with Simon and treats us to this game report. If you haven’t checked out Deanna’s and Simon’s blogs, I highly recommend doing so.

* This YouTube video shows an inning’s worth of work in which Tazawa shows off a 90-93 mph fastball, a 12-6 curve, and a shuuto. Note that his fastball has some movement and he can run it in on righthanded batters. I have no idea about the quality of competition in this game.

* This much worse amateur video is from a pro-am game versus the Chunichi Dragons. He hits 150 km/h (93mph) on the gun and you can get a sense of the movement on his stuff, but other than that you can’t tell much about how he did. The video is more watchable from about 04:00 in.

* This Japanese scouting report includes Tazawa’s stats for this season. I’m not going to translate the whole thing but I’ll give you the bottom line: 54 IP, 46 hits, 56 K, 4 BB, 6 ER, 1.00 ERA. Fastest recorded pitch speed is 153 km/h (95.625 mph) according to this.

http://www.npbtracker.com/2008/09/more-on-tazawa/#content

[Fried Neckbones]

He is in an amateur league in Japan. His team (the Shin-Nihon Sekiyu Eneos ) have a web page, but it's in Japanese, which I cannot read. However, the company that owns ENEOS (from what I can figure a Japanese electric concern) appears to be Nippon - of the infamous Ham Fighters. I have no idea how Japanese baseball works as far as farm systems, but Tazawa hasn't been drafted by anyone yet, and seems to be of the international signing, send him to (I would guess) AA and see what he has. Cagey move, if you ask me. A couple of other websites:

 

http://forums.simcentral.net/blogs/gwynar-646/amateur-league-pitcher-junichi-tazawa-scouted-by-the-red-sox-290/

 

http://www.eneos.co.jp/company/baseball/ (in Japanese, if you can translate).

[jacksonianmarch]

This has happened before. Teams have tried to sign guys from Japan prior to their draft so they dont have to wait 10 yrs. The only guy I recall is Mac Suzuki, and he did make the bigs, but he wasnt very good.