Ichiro/Johjima starting lineup data

by Deanna on Oct 9, 2006 11:17 AM PDT Comment 10 comments

Pop quiz: Every game Ichiro started in 2000 for the Orix BlueWave, he was playing right field and batting cleanup. True or false?

If you answered "false", you might want to read my latest blog entry, where I wrote a Perl script to parse a Japanese site I'd found with all the NPB starting lineups back to 1981, and got detailed year-by-year data on Ichiro and Johjima's places in their respective starting lineups.

The main interesting results are that Ichiro hasn't started in centerfield regularly since 1996, and that Johjima's never batted higher than 3rd (and hasn't batted 3rd or 4th particularly often either, 38 and 35 starts out of 1072), and 80% of his starts were batting 5th or 6th.

Unfortunately, I still haven't found a place that has box scores going back far enough for Ichiro to validate exactly how many innings he played at each outfield position.. but I think it's pretty interesting that he actually hasn't been a leadoff-batting centerfielder in TEN years. I have a feeling that's not the general perception people have these days.

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Well

...he did have a .500+ slugging percentage every single full year in Japan. Kind of a waste to put all those extra base hits in the leadoff spot. I sure would like to have some video of some old Orix games to get a look at the kind of hitter he was back then.

Strangely, thebaseballcube.com has Ichiro listed as a third baseman for every single year in the NPB. Let's make him the short stop!

by chaney on Oct 9, 2006 12:07 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs

huh.

I'm really impressed that they have his Japanese minor league numbers, but not so much that they call him a 3B. And by minor league, I mean his Western League stats, not that they call all of Japan a minor league :P

Yeah, it's true, he made a lot more sense as a cleanup hitter in Japan. The fun part was seeing which guys were batting in front of him. In 2000, Ichiro started at cleanup 104 times. Guess who was leadoff 81 times in front of him? So Taguchi. (I saw Shigetoshi Hasegawa listed as the starting pitcher in a lot of the mid-90's lineups, too.)

Marinerds - a different daily dose of baseblog.

by Deanna on Oct 9, 2006 12:18 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Interesting

So Taguchi certainly isn't your prototypical leadoff hitter. Never stole more than 14 bases in Japan, only had a .353 OBP in 2000. Did Orix just suck?

by chaney on Oct 9, 2006 12:32 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Heh, yes and no.

First, I ran Taguchi through my lineup parser. here's what it came up with.

He did bat leadoff in 47% of his starts, though he really does look like a Willie Bloomquist type from the way he seemed to get batted all over the place and in various places (he also started off 2B/3B/SS as well as the OF positions). On the other hand, what I've mostly read about his playing in Japan indicated that he was mostly valued for his glove, not his bat, though he was considered pretty speedy. He's not a guy I've done a lot of reading on, to be honest.

Orix did place 4th out of 6 teams in the league in 2000, so maybe they did suck. They were really good in the mid-90's though, playing the Japan Series in 95-96, and winning in 96. I think it's sad to note that they were so good for a while, then sank to 4th in 2000, lost Ichiro and stayed in 4th in 2001, lost Taguchi and sank to last place, where they remained until they merged with Kintetsu.

Seriously, though, I would have liked to see the defensive outfield of So Taguchi, Yoshitomo Tani, and Ichiro. I think I need a time machine :)

Marinerds - a different daily dose of baseblog.

by Deanna on Oct 9, 2006 4:18 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

So did you write regular expressions

that match Japanese? That'd be kinda cool, although I'm guessing you'd just have to look up a lot of unicode for the Kanji.

I just started learning perl in one of my classes this semester. Neat stuff.

by bluemax on Oct 9, 2006 11:46 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs

Yes and no.

I wrote a script to gather the data and translate the names, then I wrote something to parse that output. The real issue is that I made it modular so I could just type in any players' name on the command line to get their output, and I can't enter unicode on the command line ;)

Marinerds - a different daily dose of baseblog.

by Deanna on Oct 10, 2006 12:20 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Who played center and/or lead off?

This is cool Deanna. I'm confused, who played center and led off the last few years for Orix?

So Taguchi?

by Trev on Oct 10, 2006 2:41 AM PDT reply actions 0 recs

Err, I'm confused what you're confused about.

Are you asking who's played center since Ichiro stopped in 1995, or who's played center up until 2006, or who played center when Ichiro didn't?

I think the answer you're partially looking for is Yoshitomo Tani, who played center for Orix for a long time but has been mostly in left these days. He did bat leadoff a bit, but I've almost always seen him as a #3 hitter. He and Taguchi did split a lot of the leading off after Ichiro moved down in the order, and it looks like the team was trying out Makoto Shiozaki in leadoff for a while after that.

Marinerds - a different daily dose of baseblog.

by Deanna on Oct 10, 2006 3:13 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

The first question

Who played center between 1995-2000 when Ichiro was still there?

Ichiro was in RF for 1995-2000?

by Trev on Oct 10, 2006 3:29 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Yeah. You didn't read my blog post, did you?

I posted the full stats breakdown in a text file, in my Marinerds post.

Ichiro had been playing right field primarily since 1996. When I ran the stats, I asked friends in Japan about it and they were actually shocked that Ichiro had ever played center -- they only remembered him being in right field.

Taguchi and Tani started taking over center field in 1996-1997 and Tani had a lock on it from then on.

Marinerds - a different daily dose of baseblog.

by Deanna on Oct 10, 2006 11:11 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs