This story was excerpted from Ian Browne's Red Sox Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
When the Red Sox signed outfielder Masataka Yoshida?to a five-year, $90 million contract, it went down as the largest contract ever awarded to a position player coming from Japan to the United States.
Yes, this was more money than the Mariners gave to Ichiro Suzuki in 2000. More than the Yankees gave to Hideki Matsui in '02. More than Shohei Ohtani got in '17. And slightly more than the $85 million Seiya Suzuki got last year.
Some of this, of course, is due to inflation. But much of it is due to the growing confidence teams are gaining in their ability to properly analyze how well a Japanese player can acclimate to MLB.
Make no mistake: There is still an element of risk the Red Sox are taking here because you never know how a player will perform in MLB until how he gets there. In fact, the population of scouts and evaluators seems very mixed on what Yoshida has to offer. But the Red Sox have researched him and followed him for several years, and are confident in their evaluation of the type of player he can be.
Why do the Red Sox think this will work? For starters, his contact rate was at an elite level in NPB. So, too, was his on-base percentage. But you have to go beyond the numbers when analyzing how a player’s skill set will translate from Japan to MLB.
Here is a sampling from different voices on how Yoshida can succeed in MLB.
Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom: We’ve watched Masataka for a while. For us, the thing that really stood out from all angles from a scouting angle, from breaking down the performance, is just the quality of the at-bat. There’s a very unique combination of contact skills and strike-zone discipline and the ability to impact the baseball that we feel has a chance to really impact the game at the Major League level.
Agent Scott Boras, who represents Yoshida: Teams aren’t bringing a Japanese position player here unless he has extraordinary power or unless he’s a great hitter with power. This is a great hitter with power. We think he’s going to succeed here because his swing plane up top in the zone is a flat bat. He has the ability to hit for power without a big, looping swing. His eyes and strike-zone control are there. We know from watching him hitting velocity, he’s really good at it. We think the transition is going to be really, really good. I think those are the strongest components that Boston felt, too, about him.
Red Sox hitting coach Pete Fatse: I think the most impactful thing is the ability to hit velocity. Also the contact rate. The ability to hit for power, but always being in control. In leverage counts, he can take aggressive, controlled swings and do tons of damage, and he has the ability to pull back and use the whole field, go the other way.
Bloom: The way the swing works and the way that he sees the ball, those things do tend to translate really well in whatever environment a player is in. You can talk about the risk that goes along with it, but we also see upside. Especially seeing, in particular this year, power come out and the ability to let loose that power, when it fits, and the ability to put the ball in play when it fits the situation and the ability he demonstrated to do that in all kinds of different spots, and the ability to perform under pressure.
Boras: And what we really watched very clearly when we saw him face the relievers in Japan, they’re throwing 95, 96 [mph]. And there are only a few arms that can do it [in Japan], and he handled those pitchers with great acumen. [He] showed power and had the same level of strike-zone control with velocity that he had for the other pitchers, so those are things that are very impressive about him.