Update on North American Players in Japan, Part VIII: “R”

Alex Ramirez, Yomiuri Giants.  34-year-old left fielder Alex Ramirez is one of the biggest Gaijin stars in Japan right now.  Ramirez is originally from Venezuala and played in the U.S. mostly in the Cleveland organization and briefly for the Pirates.

In 1998 at age 23, Ramirez hit .299 with 34 HRs for the Indians’ AAA team, the Buffalo Bison, and his MLB prospects looked great.  The Indians had a great team then, and there wasn’t a lot of room for Ramirez on the major league roster.

Ramirez played well for the Tribe in 89 games in 1999 and 2000.  The latter year he was traded late in the season to the Pirates, where he played poorly, hitting only .209 with a .637 OPS in 43 games.

Ramirez was already 26 years old at this point, and the Pirates obviously didn’t think he had a future with them, because they allowed him to sign with the Yakult Swallows for the 2001 season.

He hit .280 with 29 HRs that first year for the Swallows and has never looked back.  He now has 267 career HRs in Japan to go with a .303 career average.

He hit .333 with 40 HRs, driving in 124 runs and scoring 105 in 2003.  He hit .343 in 2007; and last year he set Japanese career highs with 45 HRs and 125 RBI’s.  It was the third time he had driven in at least 120 and sixth year in a row he had driven in at least 104.

2008 was Alex’s first year with Yomiuri.  It was a classic case of a big, highly paid star moving from the Swallows, who couldn’t afford him, to the super-rich Giants, who could.

Alex is beginning to show his age this year.  After 79 games, he’s hitting .301 with only 11 homeruns.  At his current pace, he’ll set a Japanese career low for homeruns this year.  He has 56 RBI’s so far, so there’s also a chance he won’t collect 100 for a seventh consecutive season.   Of course, one has to remember that foreign players in Japan generally play better in the second half, so there’s still hope.

The biggest knocks on Ramirez are that he rarely walks (39 is his season high), he strikes out a lot (at least 100 seven times) and he grounds into a lot of double plays (138 times in 8.5 seasons).

Darrell Rasner, Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles.  This was a signing I thought highly of this past off-season, based on Rasner’s age (28 this year) and past MLB success.  It hasn’t worked out that way, however.

Yankees’ fans will remember that Rasner went 5-10 for them last year with a 5.40 ERA.  The Yankees gave Rasner as much work as they did primarily because their pitching last year was awful and their staff was plagued by injuries.

Still, at the end of last season, Rasner had a MLB career 5.00 ERA, largely as a starter, with 93 Ks and 54 BBs over 165.2 career innings, which suggested he was good enough to have success in Japan.

However, Rasner went 3-4 after his first ten starts for the Golden Eagles with a brutal 6.62 ERA, and they sent him down to their minor league team.  He served up eight gopher balls in 51.2 IP, which will really rowdy up the old ERA.

At the Golden Eagles’ minor league outpost, Rasner has pitched well after five starts.  He’s only 1-2, but his ERA is 3.49, and he has 23 Ks and 9 BBs in 28.1 IP.  The Golden Eagles probably won’t give up on him just yet.

Chris Resop, Hanshin Tigers.  Chris Resop is a 26 year old right-handed pitcher who appeared in 57 major league games, all in relief, for the Marlins, Angels and Braves between 2005 and 2008.  He had an ugly 5.61 ERA for his MLB career and almost as many walks and strikeouts.

After pitching poorly for the Braves last year, they sold his contract to the Hanshin Tigers on July 7, 2008.  He appeared in eight games for the Tigers last year and pitched poorly.  He had a 6.75 ERA and had only six Ks and 7 BBs in 21.1 IP.

This year Resop has appeared in twelve games for the Tigers’ farm team, and he hasn’t pitched much better than he did last year.  He has a 5.21 ERA in 19 IP, but does have 21 Ks and only six walks allowed.

Resop’s still listed on the Tigers’ roster, but so is Kevin Mench, who has long since been released.  My educated guess would be that the Tigers have already released Resop as well.

The Japanese teams don’t have much patience with American players playing badly on their minor league teams for big money.  According to japanesebaseball.com, Resop’s contract with the Tigers calls for a $650,000 salary this year, which is a lot of money for no performance.

Tuffy Rhodes, Orix Buffaloes.  I’m sure that most of you already know that Karl “Tuffy” Rhodes has probably had the greatest Japanese career of any player from the Americas.

Tuffy was originally a hot prospect in the States who failed despite quite a few opportunities in MLB.  He’s originally from Cincinnati, and he was taken by the Astros in the 3rd Round of the 1986 Draft (68th player selected.)

When he started in organized baseball, Tuffy was originally a speed demon with no power.  He stole 65 bases in the A+ Florida State League in 1988, and in his first seven professional seasons through 1992, he hit a grand total of 16 HRs.  The Astros gave him looks each year from 1990 through 1992, but he wasn’t a major league hitter yet, and he played poorly.

Tuffy suddenly developed power at age 24 at AAA Omaha and Iowa in 1993.  He .318 with 43 doubles and 30 HRs in 490 AB’s.

Tuffy played well as a late season call-up and started the 1994 season as the Cubs every-day centerfielder.

On Opening Day 1994 (4/4/94), Tuffy went four for four with three homeruns, all hit off the Mets’ Dwight Gooden.  That was pretty much the lone high-light of his major league career, though.

He hit five homeruns in 265 ABs the rest of the season and finished the year with a .234 batting.  After another slow start for the Cubs in 1995, he was traded to the Red Sox and spent most of the year playing at AAA Pawtucket.

Tuffy didn’t hit in a brief late-season call-up by the Sox and signed with the Kintetsu Buffaloes to play the 1996 season in Japan.

He wasn’t a great player in Japan right away.  He hit .293 with 27 HRs in 1996, .307 with 22 HRs and 102 RBIs in 1997, and only .257 with 22 HRs in 1998.

He had his first great season in 1999, hitting .301 with 40 HRs and 101 RBS’s.  He regressed back to what appeared to be his norm in 2000, hitting only .272 with 25 HRs and striking out 134 times.  (Good year or bad, Tuffy has struck out more than 100 times every single full season he’s played in Japan.)

Tuffy had the year that made him legendary in 2001.  He hit 55 HRs, becoming the first player to tie Sadaharu Oh’s single season Japanese record, at which point the Pacific League’s pitchers stopped pitching to him.  At least, they let Rhodes tie the record; when Randy Bass reached 54 in 1985, the Central League’s pitchers stopped throwing him strikes.  Of course, the same happened yet again when Alex Cabrera reached 55 in 2002, the very next season.

Tuffy also hit .327 that year, drove in 131 runs and scored 137 runs.  It wasn’t a fluke.  Tuffy hit 46 HRs in 2002, 51 HRs in 2003 and 45 HRs in 2004.

After the 2003 season, Tuffy wanted a multi-year contract, which the resource-poor Buffaloes couldn’t give him, so he signed with the Yomiuri Giants for 2004 and 2005 at roughly $5 million per year.

After a great year in 2004 for the Giants, he had a difficult, injury-plagued season in 2005.  He hit only .240 for the year, although he still hit 27 HRs in 379 ABs and drove in 70 runs.

However, Rhodes made the cardinal sin in Japan of publicly criticizing Yomiuri’s management when they criticized him for having a down year.  Rhodes felt it was unfair given his past performance and his present injuries, but criticizing management doesn’t go over well in Japan, particularly when you are making the big money, and he took a lot of flack for it in the Japanese media.

Late in the 2005 season, Yomiuri released him, and no other Japanese team would offer him a contract for 2006.  Tuffy came back to the States in 2006 but was cut by the Reds, his home town team, in Spring Training, and he ended up not playing anywhere that year.

In 2007, his old team (or what remained of it after the 2004 merging of the Orix Blue Wave and the Kintetsu Buffaloes) the Orix Buffaloes resigned Tuffy for less than a tenth of what Yomiuri had last paid him in 2005.

Still, it beats just about any other kind of work, and Tuffy proved he still had an awful lot left, clubbing 42 HRs, hitting .291, his highest batting average since 2001, and drawing 88 walks in ‘07.

In 2008, he hit 40 HRs and drove in 118, his highest RBI total since 2001.  Tuffy was off to a great start this year, hitting .327 and being one of the first player, I believe, in the Pacific League to reach ten homeruns.  Alas, 40 year old ballplayers have a hard time staying healthy, and Tuffy broke a bone in his right hand, apparently by getting hit with a pitch, on May 13 and hasn’t played since.

Rhodes now stands at 453 HRs hit in Japan, far and away the most by any American player.  I also assume that that he’s also the all-time American leader in runs scored (1,079), RBIs (1,230), walks (928) and strikeouts (1,608).  He’s sort of the Reggie Jackson of Japan, and he’s extremely popular there, now that the 2005 brew-haha with Yomiuri is water under the bridge.  Everyone’s entitled to one mistake, right?

He’s played in Japan for so many years now (2009 is his 13th season) that he is no longer considered a “foreign” player for purposes of the cap on foreign teams on Japanese major league rosters.