Dan Johnson Could Be Huge In Japan

It appears that the reigning AL Champion Tampa Bay Rays have decided to cut ties with celebrated pinch hitter Dan Johnson. Johnson, who famously arrived late to the Rays’ Sep. 9 game against the Red Sox after being called up from Triple-A that afternoon and hit a game-tying home run off Jonathon Papelbon, is apparently headed to Japan, where he will likely find himself in the best possible situation outside of playing in the major leagues.

Johnson was once a promising young hitter in the A’s organization, posting a line of .275/.355/.451 as a rookie in 2005. Struggling through a series of injuries, positional logjams, small sample sizes and inconsistent performances, however, Johnson has relegated himself to a “Quad-A slugger” role over the past four years.

Johnson joins a fraternity of misfits that has in the past included Jack Cust, Roberto Petagine, Tuffy Rhodes, Josh Willingham and Alex Cabrera. Outside of Cust and Willingham, who finally caught on with major league teams in their age 28 and 27 seasons, respectively, the aforementioned Quad-A boppers have all gone on to massive success in the land of the Rising Sun, and all of them profile similarly to Johnson, now 29 years old.

Having averaged just 322 plate appearances per season in the big leagues, it’s appropriate to say that it’s possible Johnson has never quite had an adequate opportunity to prove that his career minor league line of .299/.394/.523 is not outside of his abilities.

Claimed by Tampa Bay off waivers last spring, Johnson rocked a .249 ISO on top of a .424 OBP for the Rays’ Triple A Durham Bulls before earning a callup to the big-league squad, where his walk rate and isolated power remained consistent, but were coupled with an unfortunate .200 batting average in just 25 at-bats.

Guys like Johnson, who hit for power and have good plate discipline, are the guys that you generally want to hang on to if you’re interested in building a winning baseball team. However, sometimes these guys, just like people in any other profession, don’t perform when called upon. Maybe they really are “Quad-A” guys, where their talent level is just good enough that they are the best minor leaguers but not good enough to last in the majors.

Maybe they’ve just been unlucky during careers in which opportunities to perform have been hard to come by. Luckily, Major League Baseball is not the be-all, end-all of professional baseball leagues. It is, without question, the highest level of competitive baseball, but it is by no means the only place that guys can go to get paid to play ball.

The Japanese professional baseball leagues, and Nippon Professional Baseball in particular, have proved an excellent complement to their American counterpart.

Over the years, numerous frustratingly good but underachieving dudes like Jack Elliot have gone to Japan and demonstrated the talent differential between American and Japanese baseball, in the same way that the monsters of the Far East like Matsuis Kaz and Hideki have topped out at being merely good in America.

There is good reason to believe that Johnson will thrive in NPB; Good players are good players, it’s all about finding the right context and talent level for them to compete against.