Starting Pitchers As Fielders?
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Re: Starting Pitchers As Fielders?
[ Author: Guest: Masafumi Mori | Posted: Aug 8, 2007 9:52 AM
]
I am a Japanese baseball fan.
"Starting Pitchers As Fielders" is a common strategy called "teisatsu member (meaning spying starter) in Japan. Since in Central League they do not announce the starting pitcher before the game day, when they are not sure if the starting pitcher is a right hander or left hander, they temporally put a waste player (normally a pitcher who is off that day) in the starting line up and see who the starting pitcher is.
Once they know the starting pitcher, they immediately replace the waste player with a player who is supposed to be good at hitting the opponent's starting pitcher. Typically they put in right hand hitter to lefty and left hand hitter to righty.
This normally happens when the team has two-platoon players. This could happen to a player like So Taguchi who is consider to be better against a lefty, but never to Ichiro who is an absolute regular player.
"Starting Pitchers As Fielders" is a common strategy called "teisatsu member (meaning spying starter) in Japan. Since in Central League they do not announce the starting pitcher before the game day, when they are not sure if the starting pitcher is a right hander or left hander, they temporally put a waste player (normally a pitcher who is off that day) in the starting line up and see who the starting pitcher is.
Once they know the starting pitcher, they immediately replace the waste player with a player who is supposed to be good at hitting the opponent's starting pitcher. Typically they put in right hand hitter to lefty and left hand hitter to righty.
This normally happens when the team has two-platoon players. This could happen to a player like So Taguchi who is consider to be better against a lefty, but never to Ichiro who is an absolute regular player.
Re: Starting Pitchers As Fielders?
[ Author: kaibutsu | Posted: Aug 22, 2007 4:21 PM
| HT Fan
]
That really is an ingenious way to get around that problem. Since they don't announce starters ahead of time, it really only seems fair to level the playing field that way. You are just utilizing your platoon players like a MLB team (that knows the opposing starter). Not real shady at all.
TomC
TomC
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Chunichi did this by starting Kenichi Nakata and immediately subbing in Nori Nakamura at third. I also saw some teams during inter-league start pitchers only to pull them after an inning of work.
Has this been done before? I don't remember seeing it at all before this year. Seems kind of cheap to me. Will the league do anything to stop it?