December 2, 2022

By Evan Christie

Canadian Baseball Network

Shintaro Fujinami has been posted by Nippon Professional Baseball’s Hanshin Tigers.

Big-league teams will now have 45 days to try and make a deal with him.

And from all indications the Toronto Blue Jays and the Oakland A’s are two of the interested parties.

It’s no wonder RHP Fujinami, 28, a former top prospect wants to be posted, as he’s coming off of a fairly decent year. According to Japanese sabermetric site Deltagraphs, this is his best season since 2016, and he has rebounded nicely from a truly awful 2021 season.

In 10 starts with Hanshin, he put up a 3.38 ERA and struck out nearly a batter per inning. In a full season, he’d be projected to put up 4.5 wins above replacement. His 3.42 Fielding Independent Pitching was also very solid, and was good for a 92 FIP-, meaning he was 8% better than your standard Central League pitcher in that stat.

Fujinami carries a relatively standard three-pitch mix. He has a fastball which he throws around 60% of the time with an average velocity of 152 kph (94.4 mph), a slider he throws around 30 % of the time with an average velocity of 136 kph (84.5 mph), and a sinker that he throws 10% of the time with an average velocity of 145 kph (90 mph). He technically has a curveball in his arsenal as well, but he throws it less than one percent of the time and it’s so slow that it would be useless against MLB competition.

Fujinami also seemed to find one of his old strengths in 2022, which was getting people to chase outside of the zone. He managed to get batters to swing at 34.2% of pitches he threw out of the zone, which is good for ninth-best in NPB (min. 60 IP). Couple that with his 13.3% whiff rate, good for fifth-best in NPB (min. 60 IP), and you have a fairly effective pitcher.

To put that in perspective, the four pitchers ahead of him are fellow future major league hopeful Kodai Senga, two-time pitching triple crown winner Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Chunichi Dragons rookie phenom Hiroto Takahashi, and the “Monster of Reiwa”, Roki Sasaki. That is elite company to be in.

Ideally teams would be chomping at the bit to secure him, but the noise around him has been fairly muted. While one could chalk this up to the fact that two players held in much higher regard are also available in Senga and Yoshida, it has more to do with the reason why Fujinami is a former top prospect.

From 2017 to 2021 Fujinami had major control issues. For seemingly no reason he stopped being able to hit his spots, and his outside chase rate plummeted to under 20% in 2018 and 2021. It was clear that he was suffering from the yips, involuntary spasms in his wrists which affected his ability to throw accurately, and he became unable to get left-handed batters out.

Japanese Hall-of-Famer Masahiro Yamamoto was brought in as guest coach for the Tigers in 2019, and described his release as so technically flawed that it is a wonder he had been so effective previously. Not to say Fujinami has been ignorant to these issues.

As well as working with Yamamoto, he has borrowed several elements of his motion from Clayton Kershaw on the recommendation of Kershaw’s former teammate Yu Darvish. The 2022 season is the first year Fujinami has been able to iron out most of his issues and return to his former self, but that could be a consequence of small sample size.

As for which team will try to sign him, Fujinami has been linked to several teams by the Japanese media, most notably Oakland and Toronto. It is unclear if any team will be willing to take a chance on him. Fujinami seems to be the ultimate boom-or-bust signing, and it will be a case of waiting to see where he lands, whether that be with the A’s, the Jays, another club, or back with the Hanshin Tigers.