Nippon Professional Baseball’s Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles have signed right-hander Jose Urena, the club officially announced.
Tohoku is merely the latest stop in what has been a well-traveled career for the 34-year-old Dominican. He has pitched for 11 Major League teams, including five in 2025 alone. Urena showed promise early in his career in Miami, peaking from 2017 to 2018 when he posted a 3.90 ERA and 100 ERA+ across 65 appearances, 59 of them starts.
Since departing the Marlins after 2020, Urena bounced around the Majors as a mostly below-average depth arm. Over the past five seasons, he posted a 4.98 ERA with a similar 5.10 FIP while pitching for the Tigers, White Sox, Rockies, Brewers, Rangers, Mets, Blue Jays, Dodgers, Twins, and Angels.
However, those numbers undersell how serviceable he’s been over the past two seasons. Since 2024, Urena has owned a 4.06 ERA in 164 innings, good for a 98 ERA+, albeit with a mediocre 4.81 FIP and only 5.7 strikeouts per 9 innings. Purely as a reliever, he’s been much better with a 3.33 ERA in 97 ⅓ frames.
With a 96 mph average fastball, a five-pitch arsenal, and more than 1,000 MLB innings under his belt – a massive workload by NPB foreign-player standards – Rakuten is likely to use Ureña as a starter.
The Eagles fielded NPB’s worst rotation last season by xFIP, a measure of a pitcher’s expected home runs allowed with ballpark factors removed at an ugly 118, but they’ve taken meaningful steps to address it this winter. Their top reliever, Naoto Nishiguchi, is getting stretched out as a starter, and the club added veteran Kenta Maeda, along with Urena’s countryman Roansy Contreras, to bolster the rotation. They join budding ace Kota Shoji and southpaw Takahisa Hayakawa, who is coming off shoulder surgery, and a slew of others as potential rotation options in 2026.
Photo: José Ureña (54) throws to a Minnesota Twins batter during the first inning of a baseball game, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Jessie Alcheh)
