Twelve Hawks become free agents; Sugiuchi and Tanoue win Battery Award
Discussion in the The SoftBank Source forum
About
This is a site about Pro Yakyu (Japanese Baseball), not about who the next player to go over to MLB is. It's a community of Pro Yakyu fans who have come together to share their knowledge and opinions with the world. It's a place to follow teams and individuals playing baseball in Japan (and Asia), and to learn about Japanese (and Asian) culture through baseball.
It is my sincere hope that once you learn a bit about what we're about here that you will join the community of contributors.
Michael Westbay
(aka westbaystars)
Founder
Copyright (c) 1995-2024 JapaneseBaseball.com.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Some rights reserved.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Some rights reserved.
There was a mutual desire for Houlton to return, but the two parties were apparently far apart on the money. If the Hawks wanted to lowball him, they had every reason to. The righty was awful at times this year, and was also hurt for extended periods of time.
Roberto Petagine being left off the protected list was no surprise, as the big veteran slugger had said this would likely be his last stop in his long career.
Kazumi Saitoh is a different matter. It's likely he'll return because he's been signed to a coach's contract, and he is also actively making an attempt to return to the mound for the first time in three years.
The other eight names on the list were veterans Makoto Satoh, Akio Mizuta, Motohiro Yoshikawa, and Akihiro Yanase, with Shinya Suzuki, Ryuta Otahara, Yuta Arakawa, and Takeshi Tsuji.
In other team news, three players were re-signed to contracts. Minor leaguers Yuki Shimooki and Hiroyuki Kawahara were re-signed with no change in their salaries (6 million yen each, $72,000 USD). Shingo Tatsumi also re-signed with the team for 10.6 million yen ($127,000), a decrease of 3.4 million yen.
One more bit of team news was that Toshiya Sugiuchi and Hidenori Tanoue won the Pacific League Battery Award for 2010, while Kenta Maeda and Yoshiyuki Ishihara won in the Central League. In addition, the All-Time Battery Award was given out, and it went to the 1991 Seibu Lions combination of Kimiyasu Kudoh and Tsutomu Itoh (the winners of the first-ever Battery Award).