Yoenis Cespedes can jump out of a swimming pool without using his hands. Yoenis Cespedes can run a 1.8 40-yard-dash. Yoenis Cespedes can reverse the Earth's rotation and go back in time to stop the Daily Planet building from exploding. I've looked for links to a website to donate to Cespedes' campaign, but I can't find any. That doesn't matter, though, because we know that he's the best baseball player we've ever seen.
Tsuyoshi Nishioka, Yoenis Cespedes, And Pleading Ignorance
The Tsuyoshi Nishioka experiment was a pronounced failure. Is there anything about this that we can haphazardly apply to the Yoenis Cespedes narrative?
Unless he can’t play baseball very well compared to his new peers. Unless he’s one of the 200 best outfielders in the world instead of one of the 30 best. We have no idea how good he is just yet.
This comes up now because another international free agent was just sent to the minors. He, too, was supposed to be a plus hitter and defender. We had scouting reports. We had stats:
| Year | Age | Tm | PA | 3B | HR | BB | SO | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 25 | Chiba Lotte | 692 | 8 | 11 | 79 | 96 | .346 | .423 | .482 | .904 |
That was a 25-year-old shortstop in a league that is roughly equivalent to a AAA-level of play. Seemed like a reasonable gamble to sign Tsuyoshi Nishioka to a three-year deal, right? Oh, and the Twins would have to move that dead weight they already had a shortstop. J.J. Something. He could take those garish dingers and plus defense and go somewhere else.
Nishioka's major league line last year: 221 at-bats, .226 batting average, .278 on-base percentage, .249 slugging percentage. That slugging percentage was below those of Colby Lewis, J.A. Happ, and Edwin Jackson. NIshioka's defense was widely regarded as a disaster.
The point isn’t to compare him to Cespedes in a predictive kind of way, but just to point out how little we know about international free agents -- how difficult it is to scout players who are playing against competition that’s less advanced than major-league competition, and how difficult it is to parse statistics when they’re accumulated somewhere else. Bobby Valentine thought Nishioka could be really good, for example. It wasn’t just one half-awake guy in the Twins’ office who thought Nishioka was good.
Smart people who think smart things about baseball for a living looked at Nishioka, watched the film, looked at the statistics, and thought he'd be good. He turned out to be one of the worst players in the majors, and if you were holding out hopes that he'd have a renaissance season, Buster Olney said the consensus was that he looked "really lost this spring." It was a bad move before factoring in that the Twins moved J.J. Hardy to make room for Nishioka.
So we’re excited about Cespedes. That’s great. We should be. Smart people who think smart things about baseball were willing to guarantee him over $30 million. But the Nishioka demotion is a reminder that when all we have is video and statistics from inferior competition, as well as private workouts, smart people who think smart things about baseball can do really dumb things.
But all it takes is the success of a guy like Hideki Matsui or Alexei Ramirez to make you remember why teams dream big in the first place. Nishioka has nothing to do with Cespedes other than as a comp for high hopes based off scant information. But if that's the case, then Hideki Matsui is also a good comp for Cespedes. We have no idea, but we do know that right now in Rochester, there's a manager wondering what in the heck he's going to do with Nishioka.
Reminder: When it comes to international players, it’s easy to look incredibly silly. The Twins are fully aware of this now, even if they thought they were before.
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