More Johjima stats
BP’s latest Prospectus Notebook has a bit on Kenji Johjima, and includes this long-awaited tidbit:
Johjima 2000-2005 Translated Statistics with Fukuoka
YEAR AB HR SB% BA/OBP/SLG EqA EQR
2000 311 6 83.3 293/351/428 .272 43
2001 551 13 75.0 256/288/361 .226 50
2002 438 12 72.7 286/351/411 .265 57
2003 561 13 72.7 296/367/430 .277 80
2004 436 15 71.4 300/381/459 .289 69
2005 424 11 42.9 290/350/439 .272 59
A projection based on his three-year average production would be .295/.366/.442, which is a lot different than the .300/.340/.500 I came up with using a harsher version of Clay’s older estimations of NPB strength in a post last week. It looks like in the intervening years, Clay’s revised the translations again to try and project the difference in power numbers based on what we’ve seen from 2002 through last season.
Even if you knock it down for age and his new home park, that still would make a great line to get from our catcher, and if he really is as advertised defensively, all the better.
Jeff Manto, hitting coach
Being a great hitter doesn’t always help a player become a great coach. It may even be a liability. The Mariners have run through a series of hitting coaches lately, and none seem to have done the team any good, and few seem to have done any player any good.
Paul Molitor’s in the Hall of Fame, he was here for a year and then left.
Don Baylor had over 2,000 hits and some great years as a hitter. He got a year, too.
Pentland, who replaced them, has no major league experience but is highly regarded for his work as a hitting coach. So major league success isn’t a requirement for being a hitting or pitching coach, but it certainly does get players to listen, while at least in that way, coaches without credentials have to work harder to establish that they can offer something to a player.
Which brings me to Jeff Manto, who by the hand of fate, was hired as the Pirates hitting coach.
Manto was a Mariner in 1996 and played in 21 games as part of his long, seemingly random career. He played here and in Japan, in many different organizations, he hit well, and really badly, and in the later part of his career he hung around Buffalo, playing for the Indians’ AAA team, knocking the snot out of the ball, sometimes getting a couple at-bats for a major league team, and sometimes just wowing International League fans.
As a player, he’s an anti-Molitor, almost: a long career (1985-2000), but with most of his playing time in the minors, often a spare part when he was carried on a roster at all.
It’ll be intersting to see if Pentland can get any better results than the hitting stars the M’s have had lately, and if Manto, as a hitting coach with a different background than either Pentland or Molitor and Baylor, can find success with the Pirates.