After weeks of speculation in the media, Tanaka San will be going to the Big Apple to play baseball for the Yankees. Japanese pitching sensation Masahiro Tanaka has signed a 7 year, $155,000,000 deal with the New York Yankees organization.
Tanaka played last year for the Rakuten Golden Eagles where he went 24-0 while posting a 1.27 ERA, a 0.94 WHIP featuring 183 strikeouts in 212 innings. Not too shabby for a 25 year old pitcher. He played in the big leagues in Japan, known as Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), for seven years before deciding to move to the USA and try his hand in the major leagues in America. In those seven years he won 99 games and lost 35 while posting a 2.30 ERA and 1.11 WHIP.
Tanaka is considered the best pitching prospect to come to the US from Japan. He boasts three plus pitches according to the glowing scouting reports. There is a fast ball that works up to the mid-90’s, a devastating splitter that flies in at 85-90 mph and a slider that slows things down to the low-80s’.
Before Tanaka even throws his first pitch in the majors he is already being compared with Kei Igawa and Hideki Irabu who were both busts in the major leagues and especially for the Yankees. But the Yanks are willing to try again and this time they have nabbed a true rock star in Masahiro Tanaka. Great things are expected.
But becoming a pitching star in Major League Baseball is not easy… even if you are from mid-America and grew up eating and sleeping baseball. It will be especially difficult for someone coming from another country and a different culture. Neither Japanese or English are easy languages to learn and Tanaka will probably be working with a translator to begin with.
Tanaka will likely work into the Yankees lineup behind CC Sabathia but ahead of Hiroki Kuroda and Ivan Nova which gives New York a highly respectable starting pitcher lineup for 2014.
Just to show how much the New York baseball team wanted Masahiro Tanaka, the Yankees will also have to pay an additional $20,000,000 posting fee to the Golden Eagles over in Rakuten, Japan.
Once again the Yankees have surpassed the $189 Million luxury tax threshold and will have to be coughing up another hefty sum just to cover the taxes. Note also that the Yankees still have various positions left to fill before opening day.
