TOKYO, Japan – Let’s take a brief look at how some notable former MLB players are doing in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball.
Tanaka posted a 3.74 ERA in his New York Yankees career after signing the biggest contract in posting system history in 2014 at seven years, $155 million. He had what many considered a premature end to his MLB career, citing anti-Asian racism as one of his reasons for leaving America to go home to his original team, the Rakuten Eagles, in 2021. For the first two years of his much-anticipated return, Tanaka posted a solid but unremarkable 3.16 ERA, picking up his 100th career NPB win in the process.
However, he had a steep fall-off in 2023, registering a 4.91 ERA — the worst among all NPB pitchers with at least 15 starts. He underwent elbow cleaning surgery over the offseason and is yet to pitch in 2024. Regardless of how the rest of Tanaka’s career turns out, he will be one of the best Japanese pitchers ever. But fans on both sides of the Pacific hope this is not the last we see of Tanaka’s greatness.
Akiyama became the first Japanese player in Cincinnati Reds history in 2020, inking a three-year, $21 million deal. The Reds were the last team in MLB to have never had a Japanese player until Akiyama. Unfortunately, his tenure proved unfruitful, hitting .224 with a 57 OPS+ across 366 plate appearances from 2020 to 2021.
He briefly played in Triple-A for the Padres before returning to Japan in the summer of 2022, where he signed with the Hiroshima Carp rather than his original club, the Seibu Lions.
Though he was unable to hit a single home run in MLB, Akiyama will likely not have any regrets, knowing he gave it everything he had. He’s hit slightly above league-average in his three seasons with Hiroshima but is far from the elite contact hitter he once was, even breaking the single-season NPB hit record (once held by Ichiro) in 2015.
Like Akiyama, Tsutsugo made his MLB debut in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign after signing a two-year, $12 million contract with the Tampa Bay Rays. He hit his first career homer off Hyun-Jin Ryu and had a 99 OPS+ for the season, even making a World Series appearance.
From 2021 to 2024, Tsutsugo bounced around from the Dodgers, Pirates, Blue Jays, Rangers, and Giants, and even had a short stay with the independent league Staten Island FerryHawks, never giving up on his MLB dream. Unfortunately, he never made it back to the MLB level.
On May 6 this year, he made his much-anticipated return to the DeNA Baystars. In 32 NPB games, he’s slashing .222/.300/.479 with six home runs. His strikeout rate is very high at 29.2%, but he’s finding his groove again back home.
Aoki won three batting titles in Japan before going stateside in 2012. He became the hallmark of consistency over his six-year MLB career, slashing .285/.350/.387 with an OPS+ between 98 and 109 each year.
He was also a key contributor to the 2014 Kansas City Royals team that stole over 150 bases and fell just one win short of a World Series title. He returned to his original team, the Yakult Swallows, in 2018 and averaged 4.3 WAR a year over the next three seasons, including a 2020 campaign in which he had 5.2 WAR and a .981 OPS at age 38.
Now 42 years young, Aoki is still active as a bench player and has the sixth-highest batting average (.313) in NPB history for batters with at least 4000 at-bats. Though retirement is around the corner, he will go down as one of the best pure Japanese hitters ever with extraordinary longevity that rivals even Ichiro Suzuki.
