Japanese Rookies of the Year

One of my other writing gigs is at The Asian Reporter, where I write reviews, features, and a monthly column on Asian-American sports issues. Each spring, I write a preview about the prominent Asian major leauge baseball players, and that preview has grown considerably. This past year, I gave up trying to chronicle all of the probable Asian players and concentrated on the most prominent ones instead.

And one of the biggest names coming into MLB this season is Kosuke Fukudome, the right fielder who's at the heart of the Cubs' impressive lineup this year, and one of the leading candidates for Rookie of the Year. If he receives this award, he'd follow in the footsteps of countrymen Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, and Kaz Sasaki (Hideki Matsui was edged out by Angel Berroa, a laughable omission in hindsight). And like all of them, Fukudome isn't "really" a rookie.

Fukudome played for almost ten years for the Chunichi Dragons, where he was originally drafted as a shortstop, and the team won three championships while he was there. He hit over .300 four times, edging out Matsui for the Triple Crown in 2002 by hitting .343, and his best overall year was 2006, when he hit .351 with 31 HRs and 104 RBI. So how come he's a rookie?

Well, MLB determines rookie status by the number of ABs in the big leagues, and every other league is considered minor, whether it's here in the States, Japan, Korea, Mexico, or Holland. And when Nomo won in 1995, people squawked a bit at his supposed "rookie" status--but back then, people weren't all that convinced about the quality of Japanese baseball. In the eyes of most Americans, J-ball was AA or AAA quality, a weird variety of baseball played on turf, in small parks and shorter seasons, where you can always expect a fastball in a full count, and pitchers bow to batters if they plunk them. If Nomo succeeded, so the thinking went, it would be an aberration.

But as more players crossed over the Pacific to play in the States, and Ichiro won ROY and MVP in the same season, and Kaz Sasaki won his ROY award, it began to dawn on people on both sides of the ocean that perhaps Japanese baseball wasn't so inferior after all. And now, with so many players doing well--even though Hideki Irabu washed out and Kaz Matsui struggles to stay in the league--the chorus of voices crying foul at a Japanese veteran earning "rookie" status here in the States gets louder.

I'm not going to enter into this argument, except to say that the mere fact that this is becoming more of an issue says a great deal about how differently the Japanese leagues are perceived. If people truly think that Fukudome and others like him don't deserve to be Rookies of the Year, then that means the Japanese leagues are equivalent to ours, right? Nobody would squawk if a career minor-leaguer won Rookie of the Year, though they might wonder why he'd toiled so long down there. But they'll make plenty of noise if Fukudome becomes the fourth "non-rookie" rookie to win ROY in the past thirteen years.  

So if these people are to be taken seriously--the ones who are saying that Fukudome doesn't "deserve" rookie status--then the only logical conclusion is that the Japanese major leagues are equivalent to our own. And unless we're going to give them that status (which I'd imagine these Fukudome detractors wouldn't) then we all should keep the rookie rules as they are, and allow Fukudome the same status as his countrymen. If he succeeds and continues the tsunami of high-level talent that's come over from Japan, perhaps it's time we reconsider how we view J-ball.