On November 15, 2019, Tyler Austin signed a one-year deal with the Yokohama Baystars to play in the 2020 NPB season. The former Yankees top prospect had recently washed out of MLB after unsuccessful stints in the past two years with the Yankees, Twins, Giants, and Brewers.
Still, most people who noticed his departure to Japan figured he would dominate a theoretically inferior league since he breezed past every minor league level until reaching the bigs. They were proven right, as Austin hit .286/.364/.605 with 20HR in the pandemic-shortened season and had an even better year in 2021.
But here is the thing: Austin was a massive outlier, as his foreign peers mostly struggled to adjust to Japanese Baseball and were pricey disappointments.
In 2022, Dayan Viciedo led foreign hitters with 3.2WAR, good for 32nd best in NPB. In 2023, Domingo Santana finished 37th with 2.2WAR. Not exactly superstars, right?
If you pay attention to Japanese Baseball, this hardly comes as a surprise, and it is easy to chuckle when another player who was not good enough for MLB but too good for AAA comes to NPB and is met with expectations akin to: “he will hit 50 homers over there”. The reality is that NPB’s talent level, especially on the mound, is at an all-time high, and their 2023 World Baseball Classic triumph is a testament to that, as 27/31 players on the roster were with NPB teams at the time.
So when Franmil Reyes, a 6-year MLB veteran with two 30HR campaigns on his belt, was announced as the marquee signing of the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, I was cautiously excited. The “Franimal” embodies the stereotype of what NPB teams usually look for: someone with massive power and little else.
In 2023, the Chunichi Dragons tried their luck with Aristides “The Punisher” Aquino, the former Cincinnati Red who, in August 2019, set the National League ablaze when he hit a record 14 HR in a month as a rookie, an NL record. Hopes were unfairly high when he came to Nagoya, and he hit .154 with a near 50% strikeout rate in 65 miserable at-bats.
Reyes started off slow, hitting just .170 at the end of April, striking out a bunch, and not seeing consistent playing time. NPB is a sink-or-swim league for foreign talent, as teams want immediate results from their foreigners. When they don’t get them, you won’t hear from them again until the team announces they are not bringing them back.
But Reyes wasn’t like most foreigners; he stuck it out and eventually gained the trust of quirky Fighters manager and former Mets and Giants outfielder Tsuyoshi Shinjo. And when it got hot in August, so did the Dominican slugger, who hit 17HR over the last two months of the season and led the entire NPB in OPS after the all-star break. He finished 2024 with 25HR and a .290AVG while hitting the ball harder than anyone in the league (49.6% Hard Hit %), so it wasn’t a fluke either.
The rest of the bunch also did their part, with more than half of the 16 foreign hitters getting over 100 plate appearances, putting up a 125wRC+ or better, meaning they were at least 25% better than the average NPB hitter. This purposely doesn’t account for hitters with small sample sizes (most of whom were very bad), but it is still a significant shift.
Standouts include Puerto Rican 1B Neftalí Soto and Dominican LF Gregory Polanco, who brought the thump to an otherwise impotent Marines offense, accounting for nearly 60% (44/75HR) of the team’s longballs. Swallows RF Domingo Santana has been an exceptional hitter throughout his NPB career and was a key piece in the Swallows 2021 Championship.
But nobody did it better than the man himself, Tyler Austin.
Austin has always battled injuries throughout his career, but 2022 and 2023 were especially brutal. The American got just 79 AB over a two-year stretch after signing a lucrative three-year extension to stay in Yokohama through the 2024 season.
The stakes were particularly high for Austin this year. Standout aces Shota Imanaga and Trevor Bauer left. It was Austin’s fifth year in Japan, potentially his last, though he has expressed his love for playing in such a fun and vibrant environment as Japanese Baseball, specifically Yokohama. It was just a matter of staying healthy.
Though he didn’t quite play a full season, it was enough to qualify for a batting title, taking home the Central League crown with a .316 batting average, barely edging out fellow gaijin Domingo Santana. He also led NPB in slugging and wRC+, authoring the best season by a foreign hitter since Wladimir Balentien set the single-season HR record in 2013 with 60 bombs.
It has never been tougher to hit in NPB; the ball is dead, the pitching is nasty, and these challenges are magnified when you are a foreigner in a faraway land with expectations to perform immediately.
The foreign slugger is a dynamic that has been missing from the game for a while, and we probably will never go back to seeing the impact of guys like Randy Bass, Warren Cromartie, or Tuffy Rhodes, who shook the league to its core before I was even born. Still, we just had a taste of it.
Keep an eye on Austin, Reyes, and the entire NPB playoffs; fall baseball is a global phenomenon.
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WBN NPB: https://worldbaseball.com/league/japan/
