Saturday, December 15, 2007 |
Dodgers Sign Hiroki Kuroda, 3 Years/$35-36M
Instant uninformed analysis: Kuroda (J-ball stats) fills a significant hole in the Dodgers rotation. He functioned as the Hiroshima Carp's staff ace for a number of years, and has been healthy in the main while posting strong but not overpowering numbers. He'll slot in the 3-4 holes in the rotation, and should provide the Dodgers with a much better player than any of Mark Hendrickson, (an injured) Randy Wolf, or whoever happened to be fifth last year (Hong-Chih Kuo, Jason Schmidt, etc.). It also helps the Dodgers by making a suicide trade of Matt Kemp unnecessary, and best of all, they don't have to surrender a draft pick for the signing, either. It's very likely this will qualify as the smartest thing Ned Colletti has done all offseason.
Update: True Blue LA harshes my bliss, likening Kuroda to Kyle Lohse, only older and maybe more homer-tastic:
Kuroda is a player entering his mid 30s that had trouble missing bats against inferior competition. The only starters that have come from Japan with strikeout rates worse than Kuroda's are Keiichi Yabu and Masato Yoshii, neither of whom were exactly successful in their time in the states. Kuroda comes in with better control that either of those guys had, but it's still not a list of players that you want to be associated with.Kuroda's "upside" comes from the fact that we aren't entirely certain that he's going to suck like Lohse will. Will he be able to get by just by being a new arm in the league in his first season? Maybe. But there's absolutely nothing here that suggests Kuroda will have any real sustained success in the bigs. If he can't keep his slider down, Kuroda becomes a two pitch pitcher in the bigs, and his out pitch isn't really all that fearsome.
And yes, all of this could be wrong, just look at what Saito did. However, I might have to invoke the Jamie Moyer rule and say that Takashi Saito can not be used as a precedent for anything. A guy leaping from a mediocre middle reliever in Japan to quite possibly the most dominant closer in the MLB at age 37 isn't likely to happen again. Unless Saito's magical transformation starts happening again and again, mediocre in Japan will probably mean worse than mediocre in the states. That pretty well sums up Kuroda.
Labels: dodgers, transactions
would've much preferred colleti pulling the trigger on johann, and then signing him to a $200m contract. expensive, yes. but at least we know what we're getting.
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