Aniki 17 BayStars 5

Fun with early season statistics. 6 games into the Nippon Professional Baseball’s season, Hanshin Tigers’ Tomoaki “Aniki” Kanemoto has driven in 17 runs (4 HR, 29 TB, with a ridiculous slash line of .583/.593/1.208), and the 41 year old clean up hitter has topped it all off when he hit homeruns on 3 consecutive plate appearances to start off the game Wednesday in a 4 hit game against the Hiroshima Carp and drove in 7 of the team’s runs in the 8-2 win.

In the mean time, the entire lineup of the Yokohama BayStars have managed to score paltry 5 runs in their first 6 games against the Chunichi Dragons and the Yomiuri Giants. The team is collectively batting a pathetic .176 and the woeful pitching has a 7.24 ERA. No other team in the 12 team NPB has scored less than 25 runs in their first 5~6 games of the season. So, what’s the over/under on Yokohama’s first win of the season? How about a game where they score 5 or more runs? All hail the Aniki the Astonishing!

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Some NPB v MLB offense comparisons

Just did some comparisons of NPB and MLB offenses for 2005-07. Just scratching the surface here, so nothing deep yet.

R/G	Year・年	CL・セ	PL・パ	NPB	AL・ア	NL・ナ	MLB
平均試合	2005	4.40	4.46	4.43	4.76	4.45	4.59
得点	2006	4.12	3.92	4.03	4.96	4.76	4.86
	2007	4.11	3.94	4.03	4.90	4.71	4.80

 

OPS	Year・年	CL・セ	PL・パ	NPB	AL・ア	NL・ナ	MLB
	2005	0.739	0.739	0.739	0.754	0.744	0.749
	2006	0.712	0.705	0.709	0.776	0.761	0.768
	2007	0.724	0.701	0.713	0.760	0.756	0.758

 

Although Japanese baseball is known for its small ball from top to bottom (even though WBC was won with timely big bats), in 2005 NPB and MLB offenses exhibited very similar R/G and OPS numbers, then they diverged rather extremely after that (I don’t have NPB data for years before 2005, and wasn’t going to go beyond 3 years for analysis anyways, but it looks like a future project).