It's kind of interesting - there were two big rookie pitchers in NPB in 1999. Daisuke Matsuzaka went 16-5 with an ERA of 2.60 for the Lions to win the Rookie Of The Year Award in the Pacific League. Uehara went 20-4 with an ERA of 2.09 to win both the Central League Rookie Of The Year Award and the Sawamura Award. Both pitchers have gone on to help the Red Sox make it to the World Series - Matsuzaka in 2007 and now Uehara this year,
Here's Uehara's card from the 1999 BBM Mr. Giants set. This set was a biographical set for Shigeo Nagashima (aka Mr. Giants). One of the subsets in the set features Giants players who were taken number one in the draft while Nagashima was manager. This is Uehara's card (#G95) from that subset.
3 comments:
Congrats to Uehara.
It would be interesting to note the price difference [ salary ] between Matsuzaka and Uehara for Boston.
It still amazes me how bad Matsuzaaka was in the MLB.
Uehara's making $4.25 million for the Sox this year and he's under contract for $5 million next year. Matsuzaka averaged around $8.6 million per year for the six years he was with the Sox (which doesn't include the $51 million the Sox paid Seibu for the posting fee). The Red Sox ended up spending around $102 million for six seasons of Matsuzaka.
As they say though, flags fly forever and Matsuzaka definitely contributed to the Red Sox championship in 2007. As a Red Sox fan, I'm glad he was on that team. However I'm equally glad it wasn't MY money paying for him :-)
Oops - forgot to mention I got the salary numbers from Baseball Reference.
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